Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comprehensive evaluation of the errors inherent in the use of a two‐dimensional shell for modeling the ionosphere

Accurately modeling the ionosphere is a critical component to many radionavigation applications. However, in a significant number of cases, these models assume the ionosphere is compacted into a thin shell surrounding the Earth, rather than a full three‐dimensional field. While such models allow for ease of use and small storage needs, they are necessarily lacking in detailed information on the actual three‐dimensional distribution of electrons in the ionosphere. This paper attempts to quantify all geometric and numerical errors made through the use of a shell model. Such errors can reach as high as 14% on days of no strong ionosphere activity. Ultimately, this paper concludes that the highest levels of accuracy require the total electron content of the ionosphere be modeled three‐dimensionally. However, for those who must continue to use a shell model, a new mapping function has been derived which removes as much as 50% of the total errors seen using the previous, standard mapping function for shell models.
Electricity load forecasting for residential customers: Exploiting aggregation and correlation between households

The recent development of smart meters has allowed the analysis of household electricity consumption in real time. Predicting electricity consumption at such very low scales should help to increase the efficiency of distribution networks and energy pricing. However, this is by no means a trivial task since household-level consumption is much more irregular than at the transmission or distribution levels. In this work, we address the problem of improving consumption forecasting by using the statistical relations between consumption series. This is done both at the household and district scales (hundreds of houses), using various machine learning techniques, such as support vector machine for regression (SVR) and multilayer perceptron (MLP). First, we determine which algorithm is best adapted to each scale, then, we try to find leaders among the time series, to help short-term forecasting. We also improve the forecasting for district consumption by clustering houses according to their consumption profiles.
Pathways to Care for Patients with a First Episode of Psychosis

Background It is reported that patients from ethnic minority groups, in particular Afro-Caribbeans, are more likely to enter less desirable pathways to psychiatric care. We aimed to determine whether ethnicity significantly affected time to presentation, type of first contact, rates of compulsory admission and police and primary care involvement, in patients with their first episode of psychosis. Method As part of a prospective epidemiological study, patients and their carers were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire to trace the various persons and agencies seen en route to their first contact with psychiatric services. Results While compulsory admission was more likely for Black patients, the excess was less striking than in previous studies. Black patients were no more likely than other patients to have police involvement. The most important factors in avoiding an adverse pathway were having a supportive family member or friend and the presence of a general practitioner to assist in gaining access to psychiatric services. Conclusions The routes to psychiatric services for first onset patients are different to those for chronic patients. Variables associated with social support were more important than ethnicity in determining pathways to care. Police involvement and compulsory admissions were strongly associated with the absence of GP involvement and the absence of help-seeking by a friend or relative. It may be that ethnicity becomes an important variable after the patient has come into contact with psychiatric services.
A High-speed Watchdog Processor for Multitasking Systems

A new watchdog processor scheme for concurrent checking of program control flow is presented. This method is intended to check state of the art processor architectures with on-chip caches as building blocks of multiprocessor systems. The signatures are assigned, so that the processor instruction bus needs not be monitored. The run-time and reference signatures are embedded into the checked program, making obsolete the reference database and the time-consuming search and compare engine in the watchdog processor.The scheme is extended to check multitasking and multiprocessor systems.
Glucocorticoid receptor binding to a specific DNA sequence is required for hormone-dependent repression of pro-opiomelanocortin gene transcription

Glucocorticoids rapidly and specifically inhibit transcription of the pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) gene in the anterior pituitary, thus offering a model for studying negative control of transcription in mammals. We have defined an element within the rat POMC gene 5'-flanking region that is required for glucocorticoid inhibition of POMC gene transcription in POMC-expressing pituitary tumor cells (AtT-20). This element contains an in vitro binding site for purified glucocorticoid receptor. Site-directed mutagenesis revealed that binding of the receptor to this site located at position base pair -63 is essential for glucocorticoid repression of transcription. Although related to the well-defined glucocorticoid response element (GRE) found in glucocorticoid-inducible genes, the DNA sequence of the POMC negative glucocorticoid response element (nGRE) differs significantly from the GRE consensus; this sequence divergence may result in different receptor-DNA interactions and may account at least in part for the opposite transcriptional properties of these elements. Hormone-dependent repression of POMC gene transcription may be due to binding of the receptor over a positive regulatory element of the promoter. Thus, repression may result from mutually exclusive binding of two DNA-binding proteins to overlapping DNA sequences.
Diel Variability in Seawater pH Relates to Calcification and Benthic Community Structure on Coral Reefs

Community structure and assembly are determined in part by environmental heterogeneity. While reef-building corals respond negatively to warming (i.e. bleaching events) and ocean acidification (OA), the extent of present-day natural variability in pH on shallow reefs and ecological consequences for benthic assemblages is unknown. We documented high resolution temporal patterns in temperature and pH from three reefs in the central Pacific and examined how these data relate to community development and net accretion rates of early successional benthic organisms. These reefs experienced substantial diel fluctuations in temperature (0.78°C) and pH (>0.2) similar to the magnitude of ‘warming’ and ‘acidification’ expected over the next century. Where daily pH within the benthic boundary layer failed to exceed pelagic climatological seasonal lows, net accretion was slower and fleshy, non-calcifying benthic organisms dominated space. Thus, key aspects of coral reef ecosystem structure and function are presently related to natural diurnal variability in pH.
A family of differential NMOS analog circuits for a PCM codec filter chip

A new NMOS PCM codec filter uses low-noise fully differential circuits to achieve supply rejection of 36 dB and idle channel noise of 6 dB/SUB rnc0/. The die size is 24 mm/SUP 2/ and the active standby power is 150 mW/5 mW.
Insect-Inspired Navigation Algorithm for an Aerial Agent Using Satellite Imagery

Humans have long marveled at the ability of animals to navigate swiftly, accurately, and across long distances. Many mechanisms have been proposed for how animals acquire, store, and retrace learned routes, yet many of these hypotheses appear incongruent with behavioral observations and the animals’ neural constraints. The “Navigation by Scene Familiarity Hypothesis” proposed originally for insect navigation offers an elegantly simple solution for retracing previously experienced routes without the need for complex neural architectures and memory retrieval mechanisms. This hypothesis proposes that an animal can return to a target location by simply moving toward the most familiar scene at any given point. Proof of concept simulations have used computer-generated ant’s-eye views of the world, but here we test the ability of scene familiarity algorithms to navigate training routes across satellite images extracted from Google Maps. We find that Google satellite images are so rich in visual information that familiarity algorithms can be used to retrace even tortuous routes with low-resolution sensors. We discuss the implications of these findings not only for animal navigation but also for the potential development of visual augmentation systems and robot guidance algorithms.
Leadership in large and very large primary schools

This paper examines leadership in large primary schools. The paper reports on interviews conducted with heads and deputies in 26 schools with 600+ pupils. The first part of the paper sets out what the heads and deputies said about leading such large schools. Then five themes which emerged from their testimonies are explored. The themes are: context; site management; organisational structures; the role of the deputy head; professional development. The interviews have been used to inform a second stage of the study, which is a large survey of 500 other large and very large schools. The quantitative data are still being analysed at the time of this paper going to press and the findings will be reported later.
Detecting nonlinearity in experimental dataMichael

The technique of surrogate data has been used as a method to test for membership of particular classes of linear systems. We suggest an obvious extension of this to classes of nonlinear parametric models and demonstrate our methods with respiratory data from sleeping human infants. Although our data are clearly distinct from the diierent classes of linear systems we are unable to distinguish between our data and surrogates generated by nonlinear models. Hence we conclude that human respiration is likely to be a nonlinear system with more than 2 degrees of freedom with a limit cycle that is driven by high dimensional dynamics or noise.
FPGA-based Low-cost System for Automatic Tests on Digital Circuits

Digital circuits complexity and density are increasing while, at the same time, more quality and reliability are required. These trends, together with high test costs, make the validation of VLSI circuits more and more difficult. Beside high-end ATE machines, strictly necessary in ASIC production phase, low-cost ATE test systems take place into market to implement a valid support in ASIC development phase. In this paper a case study of low-cost, reconfigurable, versatile and easy-to-use FPGA-based test environment is presented. It allows patterns to be extracted from HDL-simulation and stimuli to be generated to ASIC prototypes, especially when a high-end test machine setup isn't foreseen or isn't available yet. This is the ideal solution for engineers to develop test programs and perform device tests and yield analysis on their desktop and then transfer the test program directly to production. The result is a low-cost automatic test equipment, able to execute a preliminary digital test, using just a Laptop and a FPGA-equipped board.
Academic procrastination and motivation of adolescents in Turkey

This article presents a study of academic procrastination and associated motivation variables in 508 adolescents from a general secondary school in central Turkey. Girls reported higher levels of self‐efficacy for self‐regulation and predicted higher Turkish grades than boys, but there was no difference in levels of procrastination. Academic self‐efficacy was a stronger predictor of procrastination for girls than for boys, but for both groups self‐efficacy for self‐regulation was the strongest predictor of procrastination. Most participants (83%) reported spending one hour or more procrastinating per day, with writing tasks the most prone to procrastination for boys and girls. When procrastinating, Turkish adolescent boys were more likely to spend time with electronic media (watching TV, emailing, going on‐line, and, in particular, playing computer games), whereas girls were most likely to read books, magazines, and newspapers. The article concludes with implications for researchers, and also for parents and educators of adolescents.
Trends in Aggregate‐Level Political Alienation*

This study identifies several distinct types of political alienation—including efficacy and trust—by observing their different relationships to the causes and consequences of alienation. In general, aggregate-level alienation is caused by unpopular social events or trends. The increasing tendency for citizens to expect governmental solutions to these problems has undoubtedly intensified recent levels of alienation, while the cyclical occurrence of these problems accounts for the short-run cycles in the alienation trend. Consequences of high levels of alienation are also considered, particularly conventional citizen responses which may alter governmental policies (and possibly solve the social problems). The elective process provides some avenue for citizen pressure, but the impact is not direct. Citizens do not vote incumbents out of office during periods of high alienation, but their tendency to become Independents and to stay away from the polls when alienation is high may indirectly pressure parties to.
Layered Steered Space Time Codes in multi-user systems

In this paper we evaluate a recently proposed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system called the Layered Steered Space-Time Codes (LSSTC). The LSSTC system is evaluated for multi-user environments where scheduling can be used to increase the system capacity by harnessing the multi-user diversity. This evaluation is done by comparing the capacity and the probability of error for several combinations of algorithms and criteria for scheduling users' data. The results obtained show that many of the scheduling criteria derived in literature does not perform well with the LSSTC system. Instead, a scheduling criterion that directly coincides with the detection mechanism of the LSSTC receiver is derived. This scheduling criterion can jointly maximize the capacity and minimize the error probability. Also we derive a formula for the PDF of the maximum preprocessing SNR for a Greedy-based multi-user LSSTC.
Validating the Children’s Sleep Habits Questionnaire Against Polysomnography and Actigraphy in School-Aged Children

Sleep is a vital physiological behavior in children’s development, and as such it is important to be able to efficiently and accurately assess whether children display difficulties with sleep quality and quantity. The Children’s Sleep Habits Questionnaire [CSHQ; (1)] is one of the most commonly used assessment tools for pediatric sleep. However, this instrument has never been validated against the gold standard of sleep measurement [i.e., polysomnography (PSG)], and studies comparing it to actigraphy are limited. Therefore, the current study assessed the validity of four subscales of the CSHQ via direct comparison with PSG and actigraphy for 30 typically developing school-aged children (ages 6–12). No significant correlations between relevant CSHQ subscales and PSG variables were found. In terms of the actigraphy variables, only the CSHQ Night Wakings subscale achieved significance. In addition, sensitivity and specificity analyses revealed consistently low sensitivity and high specificity. Overall, the CSHQ Sleep Onset Delay, Sleep Duration, Night Wakings, and Sleep Disordered Breathing subscales showed low construct validity and diagnostic validity. These results underscore that caution should be taken when using the CSHQ as the sole screening tool for sleep problems in children.
Dihydrofolate reductase from Escherichia coli: the kinetic mechanism with NADPH and reduced acetylpyridine adenine dinucleotide phosphate as substrates.

Kinetic studies on the reaction catalyzed by dihydrofolate reductase from Escherichia coli have been undertaken with the aim of characterizing further the kinetic mechanism of the reaction. For this purpose, the kinetic properties of substrates were determined by measurement of (a) initial velocities over a wide range of substrate concentrations and (b) the stickiness of substrates in ternary enzyme complexes. Stickiness is defined as the rate at which a substrate reacts to give products relative to the rate at which that substrate dissociates. Stickiness was determined by varying the viscosity of reaction mixtures and the concentration of one substrate in the presence of a saturating concentration of the other substrate. The results indicate that NADPH is sticky in the enzyme-NADPH-dihydrofolate complex, while dihydrofolate is much less sticky in this complex. At higher concentrations, NADPH functions as an activator through the formation of an enzyme-NADPH-tetrahydrofolate from which tetrahydrofolate is released more rapidly than from an enzyme-tetrahydrofolate complex. Higher concentrations of dihydrofolate also cause enzyme activation, and it appears that this effect is due to the ability of dihydrofolate to displace tetrahydrofolate from a binary enzyme complex through the formation of a transitory enzyme-tetrahydrofolate-dihydrofolate complex. As NADPH and dihydrofolate function as activators and as NADPH behaves as a sticky substrate, the kinetic mechanism of the dihydrofolate reductase reaction with the natural substrates is steady-state random. By contrast with NADPH, reduced 3-acetylpyridine adenine dinucleotide phosphate exhibits only slight stickiness and does not function as an activator. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Triangular Bezier clipping

Introduces a new approach to finding ray-patch intersections with triangular Bernstein-Bezier patches of arbitrary degree. Unlike the approach of W.Sturzlinger (1998), which was based on a combination of hierarchical subdivision and a Newton-like iteration scheme, this work extends the concept of Bezier clipping to the triangular domain. The problem of reporting wrong intersections, which was inherent to the original Bezier clipping algorithm of T. Nishita et al. (1990), is investigated and opposed to the triangular case. It turns out that reporting wrong hits is very improbable, even close to impossible, in the triangular setup.
A scale and rotation invariant scheme for multi-oriented Character Recognition

In printed stylized documents, text lines may be curved in shape and as a result characters of a single line may be multi-oriented. This paper presents a multi-scale and multi-oriented character recognition scheme using foreground as well as background information. Here each character is partitioned into multiple circular zones. For each zone, three centroids are computed by grouping the constituent character segments (components) of each zone into two clusters. As a result, we obtain one global centroid for all the components in the zone, and further two centroids for the two generated clusters. The above method is repeated for both foreground as well as background information. The features are generated by encoding the spatial distribution of these centroids by computing their relative angular information. These features are then fed into a SVM classifier. A PCA based feature selection phase has also been applied. Detailed experiments on Bangla and Devanagari datasets have been performed. It has been seen that the proposed methodology outperforms a recent competing method.
Self-Defining Activities, Expressive Identity, and Adolescent Wellness

This study examined the relations among activity participation, expressive identity, and wellness in a sample of 115 high school students. Results indicated that most adolescents identify several activities as self-defining. Within-person variation in identity scores across self-selected activities was substantially greater than between-person variability. Mean level identity scores were not statistically different across activity types, but boys did report significantly lower expressive identity scores in instrumental activities (school, job) than did girls. After controlling for background variables, general activity participation and self-defining activities were significantly related to wellness. Expressive identity mediated the relations between self-defining activities and wellness. Implications for interventions promoting activity involvement and identity formation are discussed.
Message strength and persuasion when consumers imagine product usage

This paper analyzes the effects of message strength on brand attitude when consumers simulate product usage. The relevant literature suggests that advertising message strength does not matter when consumers imagine product usage, but previous studies do not consider the potential moderating effects of involvement and product category knowledge. The results of this research demonstrate that among high-involvement consumers who perceive their knowledge in the product category as limited, imagining product usage does not reduce the relevance of a strong advertising message. This paper also shows that overall, imagining product usage positively affects brand attitude – regardless of message strength, involvement, and self-perceived knowledge. An important practical implication arises from the study. Marketers should encourage mental simulation in their advertisements, but be careful not to set a good argument aside if the product/service is highly relevant to potential customers and the potential customers do not perceive themselves as very knowledgeable about the product category. This finding is particularly relevant to complex or relatively new products, because here, the group of consumers who are highly involved but do not perceive themselves as very knowledgeable may be large. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Structural requirements for localization and activation of protein kinase C μ (PKCμ) at the Golgi compartment

We here describe the structural requirements for Golgi localization and a sequential, localization-dependent activation process of protein kinase C (PKC)μ involving auto- and transphosphorylation. The structural basis for Golgi compartment localization was analyzed by confocal microscopy of HeLa cells expressing various PKCμ–green fluorescent protein fusion proteins costained with the Golgi compartment–specific markers p24 and p230. Deletions of either the NH2-terminal hydrophobic or the cysteine region, but not of the pleckstrin homology or the acidic domain, of PKCμ completely abrogated Golgi localization of PKCμ. As an NH2-terminal PKCμ fragment was colocalized with p24, this region of PKCμ is essential and sufficient to mediate association with Golgi membranes. Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching studies confirmed the constitutive, rapid recruitment of cytosolic PKCμ to, and stable association with, the Golgi compartment independent of activation loop phosphorylation. Kinase activity is not required for Golgi complex targeting, as evident from microscopical and cell fractionation studies with kinase-dead PKCμ found to be exclusively located at intracellular membranes. We propose a sequential activation process of PKCμ, in which Golgi compartment recruitment precedes and is essential for activation loop phoshorylation (serines 738/742) by a transacting kinase, followed by auto- and transphosphorylation of NH2-terminal serine(s) in the regulatory domain. PKCμ activation loop phosphorylation is indispensable for substrate phosphorylation and thus PKCμ function at the Golgi compartment.