Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interplay between passive tension and strong and weak binding cross- bridges in insect indirect flight muscle. A functional dissection by gelsolin-mediated thin filament removal

The interplay between passive and active mechanical properties of indirect flight muscle of the waterbug (Lethocerus) was investigated. A functional dissection of the relative contribution of cross-bridges, actin filaments, and C filaments to tension and stiffness of passive, activated, and rigor fibers was carried out by comparing mechanical properties at different ionic strengths of sarcomeres with and without thin filaments. Selective thin filament removal was accomplished by treatment with the actin-severving protein gelsolin. Thin filament, removal had no effect on passive tension, indicating that the C filament and the actin filament are mechanically independent and that passive tension is developed by the C filament in response to sarcomere stretch. Passive tension increased steeply with sarcomere length until an elastic limit was reached at only 6-7% sarcomere extension, which corresponds to an extension of 350% of the C filament. The passive tension-length relation of insect flight muscle was analyzed using a segmental extension model of passive tension development (Wang, K, R. McCarter, J. Wright, B. Jennate, and R Ramirez-Mitchell. 1991. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 88:7101-7109). Thin filament removal greatly depressed high frequency passive stiffness (2.2 kHz) and eliminated the ionic strength sensitivity of passive stiffness. It is likely that the passive stiffness component that is removed by gelsolin is derived from weak-binding cross-bridges, while the component that remains is derived from the C filament. Our results indicate that a significant number of weak-binding cross-bridges exist in passive insect muscle at room temperature and at an ionic strength of 195 mM. Analysis of rigor muscle indicated that while rigor tension is entirely actin based, rigor stiffness contains a component that resists gelsolin treatment and is therefore likely to be C filament based. Active tension and active stiffness of unextracted fibers were directly proportional to passive tension before activation. Similarly, passive stiffness due to weak bridges also increased linearly with passive tension, up to a limit. These correlations lead us to propose a stress-activation model for insect flight muscle in which passive tension is a prerequisite for the formation of both weak-binding and strong-binding cross-bridges.
The analysis of an NMF-based perceptual image hashing scheme

This paper analyzes a recently introduced perceptual image hashing scheme. This scheme uses non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as the feature of the image on the secondary image obtained by the ring partitioning of the original one. The image hash is rotation-invariant with arbitrary degree but it is robust against acceptable content-preserving image modifications. We re-visit the algorithm and show that the algorithm tolerates some serious security flaws. Ignoring specific areas of the image in the feature extraction stage and invariance against individual ring rotation are two existing drawbacks. Practical experiments show the mentioned weaknesses and some solutions will be proposed.
Wissensmanagementsysteme in Schulen oder: wie bringe ich Ordnung ins Chaos?

Die zunehmende Ausstattung von Schulen mit digitalen Medien wird zu einer Herausforderung fur die Organisationsentwicklung. Digitale Materialien der Lehrkrafte sowie Schulerarbeiten in digitalisierter Form wachsen tagtaglich an. Bisher fehlen geeignete organisatorische und technische Moglichkeiten zur Archivierung, Verteilung und Nutzung. In Unternehmen hat sich mit dem Begriff Wissensmanagement ein organsatorisches Konzept etabliert, das die Nutzung der Ressource Wissen optimieren will. Um diese Prozesse zu unterstutzen, wurden und werden informations- und kommunikationstechnische Werkzeuge entwickelt, deren Ubertragung auf den Schulbereich aufgrund dessen organisatorischer Komplexitat aber scheitern muss. In diesem Beitrag werden diese Besonderheiten herausgestellt und die Erfahrungen mit der Entwicklung eines webbasierten Wissensmanagementsystems in Zusammenarbeit mit Schulen skizziert.
Hybrid Content-Based Routing Using Network and Application Layer Filtering

Over the past few decades, content-based publish/subscribe has been primarily implemented as an overlay network of software brokers. Even though such systems provide the possibility of bandwidth efficient expressive filtering in software, they cannot match up to the performance (in terms of end-to-end latency and throughput) of communication protocols implemented on the network layer. To exploit network layer performance benefits, recently, content-based publish/subscribe was realized using the capabilities of Software-defined Networking (SDN). While SDN allows line-rate forwarding of events by content filters directly installed on switches, it suffers from inherent hardware limitations (w.r.t. flow table size, limited availability of bits in header fields) that adversely impact expressiveness of these filters, resulting in unnecessary network traffic. In this paper, we strike a balance between purely application-layer-based and purely network-layer-based publish/subscribe implementations by realizing the first hybrid content-based middleware that enables filtering of events in both layers. Moreover, we provide different selection algorithms with varying degrees of complexity to determine the events to be filtered at each layer such that unnecessary network traffic can be minimized while also considering delay requirements of the middleware. Our hybrid middleware offers full flexibility to configure it according to the performance requirements of the system. We provide a detailed performance evaluation of the proposed selection algorithms to determine their impact on the performance of the designed hybrid middleware which we further compare to state-of-the art solutions.
A hybrid multi-objective algorithm using genetic and estimation of distribution based on design of Experiments

In this paper, we design a hybrid multi-objective algorithm using genetic and estimation of distribution based on design of Experiments. At first, we apply orthogonal design and uniform design to generate an initial population so that the population individual solutions scattered evenly in the feasible solutions space. Second, we proposed a new convergence criterion to check whether the distribution of population has the obvious regularity. When the population is convergence, we use the model-based method to reproduce new individual solutions, otherwise genetic operator was employed to generate offspring. The results of systematic experiments show that the hybrid algorithm this paper proposed capable of finding much better convergence near the Pareto-optimal solutions and better spread of solutions than RM-MEDA.
Chiral rings, anomalies and electric-magnetic duality

We study electric-magnetic duality in the chiral ring of a supersymmetric U(Nc) gauge theory with adjoint and fundamental matter, in presence of a general confining phase superpotential for the adjoint and the mesons. We find the magnetic solution corresponding to both the pseudoconfining and Higgs electric vacua. By means of the Dijkgraaf-Vafa method, we match the effective glueball superpotentials and show that in some cases duality works exactly offshell. We give also a picture of the analytic structure of the resolvents in the magnetic theory, as we smoothly interpolate between different Higgs vacua on the electric side.
A comparison of semantic feature analysis and phonological components analysis for the treatment of naming impairments in aphasia

Therapy for naming impairments post-stroke typically involves semantic and/or phonologically-based tasks. However, the relationship between individuals' locus of breakdown in word retrieval and their response to a particular treatment approach remains unclear, and direct comparisons of treatments with different targets (semantics, phonology) yet similar formats are lacking. This study examined eight people with aphasia who each received 12 treatment sessions; half the sessions involved a semantically-based treatment task, Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA), and the other half involved a phonologically-based treatment task, Phonological Components Analysis (PCA). Pre-therapy baseline accuracy scores were compared to naming accuracy post-treatment and at follow-up assessment. Seven of the eight participants showed significant improvements in naming items treated with PCA, with six of these seven participants maintaining improvements at follow-up. Four of the eight participants showed significant improvements for items treated with SFA, with three of the four maintaining improvements at follow-up. The semantic therapy was not beneficial for participants with semantic deficits. In contrast, the phonological therapy was beneficial for most participants, despite differences in underlying impairments. Understanding the relationship between an individual's locus of breakdown in word retrieval and response to different treatment tasks has the potential to optimise targeted treatment.
Front Vowels as Speaker-Specific : Some Evidence from Australian English

This investigation focuses on the degree of speaker-specificity in F2 and F3 of eleven Australian English monophthongs, determined using F-ratios from single-factor ANOVA. Non-contemporaneous samples of spontaneous speech produced by eight male speakers (four twin pairs) of Australian English were analysed, with the results indicating that the front vowels, and close-front vowels in particular, were most speaker-specific. The two most speaker-specific parameters, F2 and F3 of /I/, were then used to compare same and different-speaker pairs, with the result s demonstrating between-speaker variation to be greater than within-speaker variation in the majority of cases.
Medical Ultrasound Imaging: To GPU or Not to GPU?

Medical ultrasound imaging stands out from other modalities in providing real-time diagnostic capability at an affordable price while being physically portable. This article explores the suitability of using GPUs as the primary signal and image processors for future medical ultrasound imaging systems. A case study on synthetic aperture (SA) imaging illustrates the promise of using high-performance GPUs in such systems.
Two-Finger Caging of Nonconvex Polytopes

In general, any object can be restricted or caged within a bounded region if we evenly place a sufficient number of fingers around the object. This naive approach often leads to inefficient utilization of fingers because only two fingers are sufficient to cage most nonconvex objects. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that identifies all the caging sets, i.e., set of two-finger placements that cage a given polytope representing the object. Whether a finger placement could cage the object can be queried efficiently from a structure generated by the algorithm. We implemented and tested the algorithm in the case of 2-D and 3-D objects.
Genetic and Pharmacologic Hydrogen Sulfide Therapy Attenuates Ischemia-Induced Heart Failure in Mice

Background— Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is an endogenous signaling molecule with potent cytoprotective effects. The present study evaluated the therapeutic potential of H2S in murine models of heart failure. Methods and Results— Heart failure was induced by subjecting mice either to permanent ligation of the left coronary artery for 4 weeks or to 60 minutes of left coronary artery occlusion followed by reperfusion for 4 weeks. Transgenic mice with cardiac-restricted overexpression of the H2S-generating enzyme cystathione &ggr;-lyase (&agr;MHC-CGL-Tg+) displayed a clear protection against left ventricular structural and functional impairment as assessed by echocardiography in response to ischemia-induced heart failure, as well as improved survival in response to permanent myocardial ischemia. Exogenous H2S therapy (Na2S; 100 &mgr;g/kg) administered at the time of reperfusion (intracardiac) and then daily (intravenous) for the first 7 days after myocardial ischemia also protected against the structural and functional deterioration of the left ventricle by attenuating oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. Additional experiments aimed at elucidating some of the protective mechanisms of H2S therapy found that 7 days of H2S therapy increased the phosphorylation of Akt and increased the nuclear localization of 2 transcription factors, nuclear respiratory factor 1 and nuclear factor-E2-related factor (Nrf2), that are involved in increasing the levels of endogenous antioxidants, attenuating apoptosis, and increasing mitochondrial biogenesis. Conclusions— The results of the present study suggest that either the administration of exogenous H2S or the modulation of endogenous H2S production may be of therapeutic benefit in the treatment of ischemia-induced heart failure.
Interleukin 7 generates antitumor cytotoxic T lymphocytes against murine sarcomas with efficacy in cellular adoptive immunotherapy

Interleukin 7 (IL-7) is a 25-kD cytokine that was initially described as a pre-B cell growth factor. This cytokine has also been shown to have T cell proliferative and differentiation effects. In this report, we demonstrate that antitumor cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) generated by secondary in vitro sensitization of draining lymph node cells in IL- 7 are effective in treating 3-day syngeneic methylcholanthrene (MCA) sarcoma pulmonary metastases in mice. In vivo titrations comparing IL-7 to IL-2 antitumor CTL show that they have equivalent potency in adoptive immunotherapy. IL-7 antitumor CTL generated against MCA sarcomas of weak immunogeneity are also tumor specific in their in vivo efficacy. This study represents the first successful use of a cytokine other than IL-2 for the generation of cells with in vivo efficacy in cellular adoptive transfer.
Adaptive reduced bit-width Instruction Set Architecture (adapt-rISA)

RISA (reduced bit-width Instruction Set Architecture) is an important architectural feature to reduce code size, which continues to be an extremely important concern for low-end embedded systems. rISA reduces code size by expressing parts of the application in terms of low bit-width instructions. ARM-Thumb, ARCcompact and MIPS16/32 are popular examples. With the intent to exploit the dynamically changing “working instruction set” of today's complex software, ARM 11 now comes with two rISAs, which can be interleaved in the application binary. However, it was demonstrated that the code compression achieved by rISA is extremely sensitive on the selected rISA design. Therefore, it is important to design the optimal rISA for a given embedded application. The one optimal rISA per application approach has already been explored by previous works. In this paper, we present a scheme to design a multiple rISA architecture for embedded systems. Our experiments on MiBench report an average of 19% code compression and up to 7% power reduction of instruction memory when compared to previous approaches using only one optimal rISA.
Sieving publishing communities in DBLP

DBLP is a bibliographic database with more than one million data entries, collected from the last 70 years, and labeled with diverse attributes like the authorspsila names, the publication title, and the year of publishing. With this as ground, the motivation of applying analytical examinations to identifying publishing communities become meaningful. In this respect and focusing on the idea of figuring out existing associative connectivity between authors, this work exposes some novel information as for example the most frequent community patterns, the ldquoDonald E. Ullmanrdquo-star of 1975, and an example for a typical extreme-sized community. We close with a temporal flight throughout the decades while observing the extreme-sized community and highlight perspectives and further analytical suggestions.
Designing a high performance WLAN testbed for centralized control

In this paper, we describe a wireless testbed for centralized control. Centralized WLAN systems make use of a central controller that dynamically configures the network based on measured environmental conditions. Such networks are becoming increasingly common in many enterprise and campus deployments today. However, many aspects of centralized WLAN architectures, such as wired delay and delay jitter properties are poorly understood. This necessitates an in-depth empirical study of such systems. We describe the design issues in building a large-scale WLAN testbed for evaluating centralized control algorithms. The need for centralized control introduces some key requirements that cannot be met by earlier designs. We discuss these requirements, show how they are met by our testbed, and present experimental results that showcase the testbed's unique characteristics.
Terrain-constrained mobile sensor networks

To turn an ideal mobile sensor network simulation model into reality, terrain is one of the inevitable factors we have to consider. This work is the first attempt to address this issue, by studying the behavior of mobile sensors under constraints of terrain. Specifically, we study the power consumption and the loss ratio of mobile sensors when they are moving on different terrains. These two metrics are utilized to select the best destinations, the best paths to the destinations, and match these destinations with mobile sensors.
P.E.C. PROGRAMA DE INTERVENCIÓN EDUCATIVA NA COMPRENSIÓN EN LINGUA GALEGA: UNHA AXUDA PARA RECORDAR, ORGANIZAR, CONSTRUÍR E INTEGRAR. PEC: INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAM OF READING COMPREHENSION IN GALICIAN LANGUAGE: A HELP TO REMEMBER, ORGANIZE, CONSTRUCT AND INTEGRATE

The aim of this work is to design a program of reading comprehension in Galician language for children from 6o Primary Grade, at the time that to evaluate and to verify the effi ciency of the enclosed one. Across this REVISTA GALEGO-PORTUGUESA DE PSICOLOXIA E EDUCACION Vol. 18, (2), Ano 14o-2010 ISSN: 1138-1663 P.E. C. PROGRAMA DE INTERVENCION EDUCATIVA NA COMPRENSION EN LINGUA GALEGA: UNHA AXUDA PARA RECORDAR, ORGANIZAR, CONSTRUIR E INTEGRAR. PEC: INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAM OF READING COMPREHENSION IN GALICIAN LANGUAGE: A HELP TO REMEMBER, ORGANIZE, CONSTRUCT AND INTEGRATE Ricardo PEREIRA VILLAR Pilar VIEIRO IGLESIAS Universidade de A Coruna Data de recepcion: 20/11/2009 Data de aceptacion: 18/05/2010 Correspondencia: vieiro@udc.es
ESTIMATION FOR SENSOR NETWORKS ?

In this paper w e study distributed position estimation for sensor net w orks.The fundamentals of distributed position estimation algorithms are presented. Two types of ellipsoid outer-approximation algorithms are employed to estimate the positions of unknown sensors. P olytopeouter-approximation algorithm is also investigated. Numerical experiments demonstrate the e ectiveness of the algorithms. It turns out that polytope type of algorithm is able to yield position estimations more accurately and eÆciently.
What is Quantum Thermodynamics ? Gian

What is the physical significance of entropy? What is the physical origin of irreversibility? Do entropy and irreversibility exist only for complex and macroscopic systems? For everyday laboratory physics, the mathematical formalism of Statistical Mechanics (canonical and grand-canonical, Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac distributions) allows a successful description of the thermodynamic equilibrium properties of matter, including entropy values. However, as already recognized by Schrödinger in 1936, Statistical Mechanics is impaired by conceptual ambiguities and logical inconsistencies, both in its explanation of the meaning of entropy and in its implications on the concept of state of a system. An alternative theory has been developed by Gyftopoulos, Hatsopoulos and the present author to eliminate these stumbling conceptual blocks while maintaining the mathematical formalism of ordinary quantum theory, so successful in applications. To resolve both the problem of the meaning of entropy and that of the origin of irreversibility, we have built entropy and irreversibility into the laws of microscopic physics. The result is a theory that has all the necessary features to combine Mechanics and Thermodynamics uniting all the successful results of both theories, eliminating the logical inconsistencies of Statistical Mechanics and the paradoxes on irreversibility, and providing an entirely new perspective on the microscopic origin of irreversibility, nonlinearity (therefore including chaotic behavior) and maximal-entropy-generation non-equilibrium dynamics. In this long introductory paper we discuss the background and formalism of Quantum Thermodynamics including its nonlinear equation of motion and the main general results regarding the nonequilibrium irreversible dynamics it entails. Our objective is to discuss and motivate the form of the generator of a nonlinear quantum dynamical group “designed” so as to accomplish a unification of quantum mechanics (QM) and thermodynamics, the nonrelativistic theory that we call Quantum Thermodynamics (QT). Its conceptual foundations differ from those of (von Neumann) quantum statistical mechanics (QSM) and (Jaynes) quantum information theory (QIT), but for thermody-
Design of low power high speed SAR based 16-bit analog to digital converter: Charge sharing approach

This paper presents a high speed low power successive approximation register (SAR) based analog-to-digital converter (ADC) using Charge-Sharing (CS) principle. SARs critical path plays a vital role in high speed application of ADCs. A 16-bit SAR array with reduced critical path delay is proposed to obtain delay of 60ps, along with charge-sharing ADC incorporated with low-voltage low-power double-tail comparator (LV-LPDTC), is proposed in 45nm CMOS to convert 10 MSps at 600 mV supply voltage and 40MSps when supply voltage raised by 66.67%. The SAR controller array consumed 16.47 μW, which leads to a overall power consumption of 149.1 μW. The measured effective-number-of-bits is 15.1, confined to a FoM of 70.76 fJ/conversion-step.