Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real Time Information Based Energy Management Using Customer Preferences and Dynamic Pricing in Smart Homes

This paper presents real time information based energy management algorithms to reduce electricity cost and peak to average ratio (PAR) while preserving user comfort in a smart home. We categorize household appliances into thermostatically controlled ( tc ), user aware ( ua ), elastic ( el ), inelastic ( iel ) and regular ( r ) appliances/loads. An optimization problem is formulated to reduce electricity cost by determining the optimal use of household appliances. The operational schedules of these appliances are optimized in response to the electricity price signals and customer preferences to maximize electricity cost saving and user comfort while minimizing curtailed energy. Mathematical optimization models of tc appliances, i.e., air-conditioner and refrigerator, are proposed which are solved by using intelligent programmable communication thermostat ( iPCT). We add extra intelligence to conventional programmable communication thermostat (CPCT) by using genetic algorithm (GA) to control tc appliances under comfort constraints. The optimization models for ua , el , and iel appliances are solved subject to electricity cost minimization and PAR reduction. Considering user comfort, el appliances are considered where users can adjust appliance waiting time to increase or decrease their comfort level. Furthermore, energy demand of r appliances is fulfilled via local supply where the major objective is to reduce the fuel cost of various generators by proper scheduling. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms efficiently schedule the energy demand of all types of appliances by considering identified constraints (i.e., PAR, variable prices, temperature, capacity limit and waiting time).
A review and design of the on-chip rectifiers for RF energy harvesting

This paper presents an overview of the CMOS on-chip rectifiers for RF energy harvesting in the RFID, internet of things, or wearable device applications. The pros and cons of different RF to DC rectifier topologies are investigated, compared, and summarized. All the topologies are designed and optimized in a 65nm CMOS process, with the input power range from -10dBm to 4dBm and the load resistor range from 10kΩ to 1MΩ. The simulated results show that the cross-connected (CC) topology exhibits the highest achievable power conversion efficiency up to 65% (rectifier only), while the CC topology with the threshold voltage cancellation technique and the MOS diode topology achieve 46.7% and 51%, respectively.
Generation of an Apoptotic Intracellular Peptide by γ-Secretase Cleavage of Alzheimer's Amyloid ß Protein Precursor

The amyloid beta protein precursor (AbetaPP) is sequentially processed by beta- and gamma-secretases to generate the Abeta peptide. The biochemical path leading to Abeta formation has been extensively studied since extracellular aggregates of amyloidogenic forms of Abeta peptide (Abeta42) are considered the culprit of Alzheimer's disease. Aside from its pathological relevance, the biological role of AbetaPP proteolysis is unknown. Although never previously described, cleavage of AbetaPP by gamma-secretase should release, together with Abeta, a COOH-terminal AbetaPP Intracellular Domain, herein termed AID. We have now identified AID-like peptides in brain tissue of normal control and patients with sporadic Alzheimer's disease and demonstrate that AID acts as a positive regulator of apoptosis. Thus, overproduction of AID may add to the toxic effect of Abeta42 aggregates and further accelerate neurodegeneration.
Stimulation of Soluble Guanylate Cyclase by an Acetylcholine‐Induced Endothelium‐Derived Factor from Rabbit and Canine Arteries

The present study was designed to investigate the hypothesis that, during acetylcholine-induced endothelium-dependent relaxation, a factors) is released from endothelial cells which directly activates soluble guanylate cyclase. We attempted to determine what similarities or differences existed between this factor and endothelium-derived relaxing factor. The study was performed on segments of rabbit aorta and canine femoral artery. Purified soluble guanylate cyclase was injected into the lumen of these vascular segments, together with its substrate, for intraluminal incubation of the enzyme. In endothelium-intact vascular segments, the activity of guanylate cyclase was enhanced over control values obtained by incubation in test tubes. The stimulation was further increased by acetylcholine in concentrations which caused relaxation of the vascular segments. The stimulating principle could not be transferred from the vessel lumen to an external solution of guanylate cyclase, indicating a short life-time. Removal of the endothelium prevented formation and release of the guanylate cyclase stimulating factors). Atropine, mepacrine, or nordihydroguaiaretic acid, which inhibit acetylcholine-induced endothelium-dependent relaxations, also inhibited acetylcholine-induced endothelium-mediated activation of guanylate cyclase. The results support the hypothesis that acetylcholine-induced endothelium-derived relaxing factor increases cyclic guanosine monophosphate levels of vascular smooth muscle by a stimulation of soluble guanylate cyclase.
USE OF THE NITROBLUE TETRAZOLIUM (NBT) TEST IN THE DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN PYELONEPHRITIS AND CYSTITIS

ABSTRACT: Björkstén, B. and de Chateau, P. (Department of Paediatrics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden.) Use of the Nitroblue Tetrazolium (NBT) Test in the differentiation between pyelonephritis and cystitis. Acta Paediatr Scand 64:182, 1975. – NBT tests were performed on blood from 37 patients with urinary tract infections caused by conform bacteria. The level of infections was evaluated by the clinical signs, ESR, renal concentrating capacity and titre of antibodies against the strains of E. coli isolated in their urine. Elevated proportions of NBT‐positive neutrophils were found in 11 of 14 patients with pyelonephritis and in 3 of 23 patients with cystitis or asymptomatic bacteriuria (ABU). The total number of NBT‐positive neutrophils was 1000 or more per mm3 blood in 11 of 13 patients considered to have pyelonephritis, while it was 800 or less in all the patients investigated, evaluated as having cystitis or asymptomatic bacteriuria. The NBT test is recommended as an adjunct in the level diagnosis or urinary tract infections in children. The utility of the test in smouldering pyelonephritis is presently being investigated.
DOUBLE DUTY: GENETIC ALGORITHMS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND GENETIC ALGORITHMS INSPIRED BY ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY

Modularity is widely used in system analysis and design such as complex engineering products and their organization. Also, modularity is the key to solve optimization problems efficiently via problem decomposition. We first discover modularity in a system, and then leverage this knowledge to improve the performance of the system. In this chapter, we tackle both problems with the alliance of organizational theory and evolutionary computation. First, we cluster the dependency structure matrix (DSM) of a system using a simple genetic algorithm (GA) and an information theoretic based metric. Then we design a better GA through the decomposition of the optimization problem using the proposed DSM clustering method
Salivary Gland NK Cells Are Phenotypically and Functionally Unique

Natural killer (NK) cells and CD8+ T cells play vital roles in containing and eliminating systemic cytomegalovirus (CMV). However, CMV has a tropism for the salivary gland acinar epithelial cells and persists in this organ for several weeks after primary infection. Here we characterize a distinct NK cell population that resides in the salivary gland, uncommon to any described to date, expressing both mature and immature NK cell markers. Using RORγt reporter mice and nude mice, we also show that the salivary gland NK cells are not lymphoid tissue inducer NK-like cells and are not thymic derived. During the course of murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV) infection, we found that salivary gland NK cells detect the infection and acquire activation markers, but have limited capacity to produce IFN-γ and degranulate. Salivary gland NK cell effector functions are not regulated by iNKT or Treg cells, which are mostly absent in the salivary gland. Additionally, we demonstrate that peripheral NK cells are not recruited to this organ even after the systemic infection has been controlled. Altogether, these results indicate that viral persistence and latency in the salivary glands may be due in part to the presence of unfit NK cells and the lack of recruitment of peripheral NK cells.
Generating Creative Ideas Through Crowds: An Experimental Study of Combination

The crowd is emerging as a new source of innovation, and here a new way of organizing the crowd to produce new ideas is discussed: an idea generation system using combination in which participants synthesize new designs from the efforts of their peers. A crowd generates designs; then another crowd combines the designs of the previous crowd. In an experiment with 540 participants, the combined designs are compared to the initial designs, and to a control condition in which fresh idea generation rather than combination is used. The results show that designs become more creative in later generations of the combination system, and the combination produces more creative ideas than the fresh idea generation. The model of crowdsourced idea generation discussed here may be used to instantiate systems that can be applied to a wide range of design problems. The work has pragmatic implications, and also theoretical implications: new forms of coordination are now possible, and, using the crowd, it is possible to build and test existing and emerging theories of coordination and design.
Region‐specific regulation of posterior axial elongation during vertebrate embryogenesis

Background: The vertebrate body axis extends sequentially from the posterior tip of the embryo, fueled by the gastrulation process at the primitive streak and its continuation within the tailbud. Anterior structures are generated early, and subsequent nascent tissues emerge from the posterior growth zone and continue to elongate the axis until its completion. The underlying processes have been shown to be disrupted in mouse mutants, some of which were described more than half a century ago. Results: Important progress in elucidating the cellular and genetic events involved in body axis elongation has recently been made on several fronts. Evidence for the residence of self‐renewing progenitors, some of which are bipotential for neurectoderm and mesoderm, has been obtained by embryo‐grafting techniques and by clonal analyses in the mouse embryo. Transcription factors of several families including homeodomain proteins have proven instrumental for regulating the axial progenitor niche in the growth zone. A complex genetic network linking these transcription factors and signaling molecules is being unraveled that underlies the phenomenon of tissue lengthening from the axial stem cells. The concomitant events of cell fate decision among descendants of these progenitors begin to be better understood at the levels of molecular genetics and cell behavior. Conclusions: The emerging picture indicates that the ontogenesis of the successive body regions is regulated according to different rules. In addition, parameters controlling vertebrate axial length during evolution have emerged from comparative experimental studies. It is on these issues that this review will focus, mainly addressing the study of axial extension in the mouse embryo with some comparison with studies in chick and zebrafish, aiming at unveiling the recent progress, and pointing at still unanswered questions for a thorough understanding of the process of embryonic axis elongation. Developmental Dynamics 243:88–98, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Navigating multiple augmented reality overlays through occlusion-based triggers

Most Augmented Reality applications feature an information overlay over physical objects that consists of text, images, and animated 3-D models. We go a step further by using an AR-menu and linking multiple overlays using occlusion-based triggers that help navigate between the different overlays. This paper describes the development of an AR-based tutorial for a common real-world scenario. Using multiple overlays allows us to design a comprehensive AR tutorial by presenting more information on the same physical object in a hierarchical manner with a narrative structure. We describe the design features in an attempt to elucidate the issues related to the development of the AR tutorials.
Network Properties of Complex Human Disease Genes Identified through Genome-Wide Association Studies

Background Previous studies of network properties of human disease genes have mainly focused on monogenic diseases or cancers and have suffered from discovery bias. Here we investigated the network properties of complex disease genes identified by genome-wide association studies (GWAs), thereby eliminating discovery bias. Principal findings We derived a network of complex diseases (n = 54) and complex disease genes (n = 349) to explore the shared genetic architecture of complex diseases. We evaluated the centrality measures of complex disease genes in comparison with essential and monogenic disease genes in the human interactome. The complex disease network showed that diseases belonging to the same disease class do not always share common disease genes. A possible explanation could be that the variants with higher minor allele frequency and larger effect size identified using GWAs constitute disjoint parts of the allelic spectra of similar complex diseases. The complex disease gene network showed high modularity with the size of the largest component being smaller than expected from a randomized null-model. This is consistent with limited sharing of genes between diseases. Complex disease genes are less central than the essential and monogenic disease genes in the human interactome. Genes associated with the same disease, compared to genes associated with different diseases, more often tend to share a protein-protein interaction and a Gene Ontology Biological Process. Conclusions This indicates that network neighbors of known disease genes form an important class of candidates for identifying novel genes for the same disease.
Crystal structure of a fibrillarin homologue from Methanococcus jannaschii, a hyperthermophile, at 1.6 Å resolution

Fibrillarin is a phylogenetically conserved protein essential for efficient processing of pre‐rRNA through its association with a class of small nucleolar RNAs during ribosomal biogenesis. The protein is the antigen for the autoimmune disease scleroderma. Here we report the crystal structure of the fibrillarin homologue from Methanococcus jannaschii, a hyperthermophile, at 1.6 Å resolution. The structure consists of two domains, with a novel fold in the N‐terminal region and a methyltransferase‐like domain in the C‐terminal region. Mapping temperature‐sensitive mutations found in yeast fibrillarin Nop1 to the Methanococcus homologue structure reveals that many of the mutations cluster in the core of the methyltransferase‐like domain.
Accelerating Dynamic Cardiac MR Imaging Using Structured Sparse Representation

Compressed sensing (CS) has produced promising results on dynamic cardiac MR imaging by exploiting the sparsity in image series. In this paper, we propose a new method to improve the CS reconstruction for dynamic cardiac MRI based on the theory of structured sparse representation. The proposed method user the PCA subdictionaries for adaptive sparse representation and suppresses the sparse coding noise to obtain good reconstructions. An accelerated iterative shrinkage algorithm is used to solve the optimization problem and achieve a fast convergence rate. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the reconstruction quality of dynamic cardiac cine MRI over the state-of-the-art CS method.
Self-assembly of soft-matter quasicrystals and their approximants

The surprising recent discoveries of quasicrystals and their approximants in soft-matter systems poses the intriguing possibility that these structures can be realized in a broad range of nanoscale and microscale assemblies. It has been theorized that soft-matter quasicrystals and approximants are largely entropically stabilized, but the thermodynamic mechanism underlying their formation remains elusive. Here, we use computer simulation and free-energy calculations to demonstrate a simple design heuristic for assembling quasicrystals and approximants in soft-matter systems. Our study builds on previous simulation studies of the self-assembly of dodecagonal quasicrystals and approximants in minimal systems of spherical particles with complex, highly specific interaction potentials. We demonstrate an alternative entropy-based approach for assembling dodecagonal quasicrystals and approximants based solely on particle functionalization and shape, thereby recasting the interaction-potential-based assembly strategy in terms of simpler-to-achieve bonded and excluded-volume interactions. Here, spherical building blocks are functionalized with mobile surface entities to encourage the formation of structures with low surface contact area, including non-close-packed and polytetrahedral structures. The building blocks also possess shape polydispersity, where a subset of the building blocks deviate from the ideal spherical shape, discouraging the formation of close-packed crystals. We show that three different model systems with both of these features—mobile surface entities and shape polydispersity—consistently assemble quasicrystals and/or approximants. We argue that this design strategy can be widely exploited to assemble quasicrystals and approximants on the nanoscale and microscale. In addition, our results further elucidate the formation of soft-matter quasicrystals in experiment.
Interfilament interactions in the cytoskeleton : single filament measurements and mechanical consequences

The eucaryotic cytoskeleton is composed of three major filament systems: actin filaments, microtubules and intermediate filaments, and is responsible for the mechanical properties of the cell, the intracellular transport network and the organization of the cytoplasm. Previous studies have focussed on the role of a single filament systems in isolation. In this thesis, the role of inter-filament system interactions in the cytoskeleton is investigated. Interfilament interactions are classified by the physical mechanism responsible-steric constraints, passive binding or active, force-generating sliding attachments. Steric constraints result from filaments being unable to pass through each other. Passive binding is provided by molecules that can bind two filaments together. Active interactions are provided by mechanoenzymes that bind two filaments together and transduce chemical energy into the mechanical translocation of one filament along the other. For each physical mechanism in vitro experimental evidence for a specific interfilament interaction is demonstrated and putative cellular roles are discussed. The steric interactions between microtubules and actin filaments are explored through the direct visualization of microtubule diffusion, or reptation, in a network of actin filaments. The presence of the actin network results in a sigmoidal dependence of diffusion on filament length for the microtubule switching from low diffusivity to high diffusivity at-15 pm. This sigmoidal dependence is not predicted by current polymer theories and the underlying mechanism remains to be defined. The pronounced effect of steric constraints on MT diffusivity implicates their role in the spatial organization of microtubules and actin filaments in the cell. Passive crosslinking is demonstrated by the direct binding of a c-terminal peptide of a vimentin-type intermediate filament to actin filaments and was investigated by biochemical and light scattering techniques. The interaction between full-length vimentin and actin filaments, presumably mediated by the c-terminus in part, is demonstrated by unique material properties of a mixture of the filaments that are unlike either filament system alone. The composite material properties demonstrates the role of passive interfilament binding in cellular mechanics. Active sliding attachments between neuronal intermediate filaments, or neurofilaments, and microtubules are shown to be mediated by kinesin and dynein microtubule motor proteins. Fluorescently labelled native neurofilaments are observed to translocate bidirectionally along purified microtubules. The motility is due to the dynein/dynactin motor complex and at least one kinesin-like protein. The bidirectional nature of the motility supports a hypothesis whereby the axonal transport of neurofilaments in neurons proceeds by fast bidirectional saltatory motions which result the observed …
A Model of Learning Task-specific Knowledge for a new Task

In this paper I will present a detailed ACT-R model of how the task-specific knowledge for a new, complex task is learned. The model is capable of acquiring its knowledge through experience, using a declarative representation that is gradually compiled into a procedural representation. The model exhibits several characteristics that concur with Fitts' and Anderson's theories of skill learning, and can be used to show that individual differences in working-memory capacity initially have a large impact on performance, but that this impact diminished after sufficient experience, which is consistent with Ackermans's theory of skill learning. Some preliminary experimental data support these findings.
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN WRITING AN ESSAY THROUGH PEER-ASSESSMENT STRATEGY AT THE FIFTH SEMESTER IN CIPTA WACANA CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY OF MALANG

Abstract: English students are expected to be able to produce an effective essay for the sake of their academic writing. For this purpose, they should pay attention to the rhetorical aspects of writing such as content, organization of ideas, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and mechanics. This article presents the result of classroom action research conducted to overcome practical problems of writing an essay by using peer-assessment strategy. The subject of this study was 14 fifth-semester students of CiptaWacanaChristianUniversity of Malang taking essay writing class. In general the strategy proves effective in improving the students’ ability in writing an essay. In addition to the writing achievement, the strategy is able to improve the quality of learning process of essay writing. The students are motivated to write an essay more enthusiastically and are much aided to be a better writer; they no more think that writing is a burden, so they have a good response and an attitude to the strategy. Key Words: Improving, Essay Writing Ability, Peer-Assessment Strategy