Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High‐efficiency three‐phase bidirectional dc–ac converter for energy storage systems

This study presents a high-efficiency three-phase bidirectional dc–ac converter for use in energy storage systems (ESSs). The proposed converter comprises a modified three-level T-type converter (M3LT2C) and a three-level bidirectional dc–dc converter. The M3LT2C comprises two T-type cells to interface with a three-phase grid. By directly connecting the S-phase of the grid to a neutral point on the dc link, the active and passive components are required for only two grid phases, which reduces power losses, system volume, and production cost. A direct nominal voltage compensation control algorithm enables the converter to obtain high grid power quality. Also, the three-level bidirectional dc–dc converter enables low switching and conduction losses with reduced voltage stress across the switches. In addition, a simple dc-link voltage-balancing algorithm enables the balancing of two split dc-link capacitor voltages. To confirm the theoretical analysis of the proposed converter and assess its validity, a 10-kW prototype was implemented and tested.
The impact of finite-alphabet input on the secrecy-achievable rates for broadcast channel with confidential message

This paper investigates the maximization of the secrecy-achievable rate region for the Gaussian broadcast channel with confidential message (BCCM) using finite input constellations. The maximization is done jointly over symbol positions and their joint probabilities. The secrecy-achievable rate regions are given for various broadcast strategies which differ in their complexity of implementation. We compare these strategies in terms of improvement in achievable rates and we study the impact of finite input alphabet on the secrecy-achievable rates. It is shown that finite alphabet constraints may change well known results holding in the Gaussian case.
Playing your network: gaming in social network sites

Recently the use of social network sites have emerged as one of the most important and time-consuming online activities. In the large and diversified social network scenario Facebook emerged as one of the most important sites at least in the United States and in Europe. In the Facebook-based gaming scene Playfish, a UK based company, has recently gained a leading position with more than 50 million registered players. The paper will analyze these five games, observing, starting from Playfish’s games, how Facebook games use the social network site and the social relationships between players as a core element for the game experience. In SNS several different contexts of life seems to exist one near the others and eventually overlapping. Closest friends with co-workers, relatives with ex-schoolmates: the paper will present how the new SNS environment can be used for gaming and how gaming activities change when they enter the collapsed context of SNSs.
On Pricing Derivatives in the Presence of Auxiliary State Variables

Binomial, trinomial, and other lattice-based option pricing procedures are extremely useful in dealing with early exercise because solution by backward induction is possible. As one rolls back through the tree, the option value at each node depends on the current price for the underlying and the paths that might be followed going forward. But for many kinds of derivatives, the value at a given point in time depends on both the current asset price and the price path that it has followed up to the current point. Derivatives on interest rates in the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) model are one example. Another is option pricing when the underlying volatility varies over time according to a GARCH model. The most successful technique for adapting a lattice model to a path-dependent process has been to carry along a set of auxiliary variables that summarize (approximately) the necessary path information at each node. These techniques work, but they are typically very time consuming. In this article, Lin and Ritchken present a way to greatly increase the efficiency of this procedure. Some auxiliary path information must still be carried through the tree, but much less is needed. They demonstrate the sharp increase in performance this makes possible in an HJM application and for an underlying that follows a GARCH process.
Hepatitis B viral replication influences the expression of natural killer cell ligands

Background Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is accounting for over one million deaths annually due to immune-mediated chronic liver damage. Natural killer (NK) cells are abundant in the liver and contribute in HBV persistence. NK cytotoxic effects are controlled by signals from activating and inhibitory receptors. HBV may circumvent host antiviral immunity via the regulation of NK receptors and their ligands. We investigated the effect of viral replication and HBeAg mutations on NK mediators expression in the livers of chronic HBV (CHB) patients and in cell cultures. Methods HBV monomers bearing hotspot mutations in the basal core promoter and precore region were transfected into HepG2 cells using a plasmid-free assay. Serum viremia and liver HBV RNA were measured in 19 CHB patients. The expression of HBV RNA and of NKG2D ligands, B7H6, DNAX accessory molecule-1, lectin-like transcript 1 (LLT1), LFA-1 and TRAIL was measured in the livers of CHB patients and transfected cells. Results In general, high HBV replication in CHB patients and cell lines upregulated the mRNA of all NK cell ligands and particularly the inhibitory NK cell ligand, LLT1. The exception was the NKG2D ligand, MICA, that was significantly decreased in patients with high serum viremia and intrahepatic HBV RNA levels. Conclusions HBV replication has differential effects on NK cell ligands suggesting a potential escape mechanisms through up-regulation of LLT1 and down-regulation of MICA. A general trend towards upregulating NK cell ligands can be counteracted by decreasing MICA and hence weakening NK surveillance.
The impact of gas physics on strong cluster lensing

Previous studies of strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters have neglected the potential impact of the intracluster gas. Here, we compare simulations of strong cluster lensing including gas physics at increasing levels of complexity, i.e. with adiabatic, cooling, star-forming, feedback-receiving, and thermally conducting gas, along with different implementations of the artificial viscosity in the SPH simulations. Each cluster was simulated starting from the same initial conditions so as to allow direct comparison of the simulated clusters. We compare the clusters’ shapes, dynamics, and density profiles and then study their strong-lensing cross sections computed by means of ray-tracing simulations. With the common viscosity implementation, adiabatic gas has little effect on strong cluster lensing, while lower viscosity allows stronger turbulence, thus higher non-thermal pressure and a generally broader gas distribution, which tends to lower lensing cross sections. Conversely, cooling and star formation steepen the core density profiles and can thus increase the strong-lensing efficiency considerably.
Supporting Concept Extraction and Identifier Quality Improvement through Programmers' Lexicon Analysis

Identifiers play an important role in communicating the intentions associated with the program entities they represent. The information captured in identifiers support programmers to (re-)build the âmental modelâ of the software and facilitates understanding. (Re-)building the âmental modelâ and understanding large software, however, is difficult and expensive. Besides, the effort involved in the process heavily depends on the quality of the programmersâ lexicon used to construct the identifiers. This thesis addresses the problem of program understanding focusing on (i) concept extraction, and (ii) quality of the lexicon used in identifiers. To address the first problem (concept extraction), two ontology extraction approaches exploiting the natural language information captured in identifiers and structural information of the source code are proposed and evaluated. We have also proposed a method to automatically train a natural language analyzer for identifiers. The trained analyzer is used for concept extraction. The evaluation was conducted on a program understanding task, concept location. Results show that the extracted concepts increase the effectiveness of concept location queries. Besides extracting concepts from the source code, we have investigated information retrieval (IR) based techniques to filter domain concepts from implementation concepts. To address the second problem (quality of the lexicon used in identifiers), we have defined a publicly available catalog of lexicon bad smells (LBS) and developed a suite of tools to automatically detect them. LBS indicate some potential lexicon construction problems that can be addressed through refactoring. The impact of LBS on concept location and the contribution they can give to fault prediction have been studied empirically. Results indicate that LBS refactoring has a significant positive impact on IR-based concept location task and contributes to improve fault prediction, when used in conjunction with structural metrics. In addition to detecting LBS in identifiers, we try also to fix them. We have proposed an approach which uses the concepts extracted from the source code to suggest names which can be used to complete or replace an identifier. The evaluation of the approach shows that it provides useful suggestions, which can effectively support programmers to write consistent names.
Power conversion efficiency characterization and optimization for smartphones

Modern smartphones consume significant power and can hardly provide a full day's use between charging operations even with a 2000 mAh battery. This is in spite of many power management techniques being employed in the smartphones. This paper starts from the observation that modern smartphones waste a significant amount of the battery's stored energy during power conversion from the 3.7V output of a Li-Ion battery cell to different voltage levels needed to power various modules in a smartphone (processors, memory, display, GPS, etc.) Indeed the power conversion efficiency from the battery source to point of use in the smart phone has on average of only 60-75% efficiency. The approach taken to reduce this energy waste in smartphones is to (i) profile the power consumption of each module under different operating scenarios, (ii) build an equivalent DC-DC converter model for each smartphone module and estimate its power conversion efficiency, and (iii) change the parameters of the actual converters in the smartphone to improve the equivalent power conversion efficiencies for all modules. Experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve 6% to 15% power conversion efficiency enhancement, which translates to up to 30% reduction in the power losses incurred during power conversion in smartphones.
Evidence of Spatially Extensive Resistance to PCBs in an Anadromous Fish of the Hudson River

Populations of organisms that are chronically exposed to high levels of chemical contaminants may not suffer the same sublethal or lethal effects as naive populations, a phenomenon called resistance. Atlantic tomcod (Microgadus tomcod) from the Hudson River, New York, are exposed to high concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and bioaccumulate polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs). They have developed resistance to PCBs and PCDDs but not to PAHs. Resistance is largely heritable and manifests at early-life-stage toxic end points and in inducibility of cytochrome P4501A (CYP1A) mRNA expression. Because CYP1A induction is activated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) pathway, as are most toxic responses to these compounds, we sought to determine the geographic extent of resistance to CYP1A mRNA induction by PCBs in the Hudson River tomcod population. Samples of young-of-the-year tomcod were collected from seven locales in the Hudson River, extending from the Battery at river mile 1 (RM 1) to RM 90, and from the Miramichi River, New Brunswick, Canada. Laboratory-reared offspring of tomcod adults from Newark Bay, in the western portion of the Hudson River estuary, were also used in this study. Fish were partially depurated in clean water and intraperitoneally injected with 10 ppm coplanar PCB-77, 10 ppm benzo[a]pyrene (BaP), or corn oil vehicle, and levels of CYP1A mRNA were determined. CYP1A was significantly inducible by treatment with BaP in tomcod from the Miramichi River, from laboratory-spawned offspring of Newark Bay origin, and from all Hudson River sites spanning 90 miles of river. In contrast, only tomcod from the Miramichi River displayed significantly induced CYP1A mRNA expression when treated with PCB-77. Our results suggest that the population of tomcod from throughout the Hudson River estuary has developed resistance to CYP1A inducibility and probably other toxicities mediated by the AHR pathway. Tomcod from the Hudson River may represent the most geographically expansive population of vertebrates with resistance to chemical pollutants that has been characterized.
Pivotal Role of Local Ang-II Production in the Subfornical Organ on Water Intake: 2

Chromogranin A (CHGA), a 48 kDa secretory pro-hormone, is the major protein co-stored and co-released with catecholamines from secretory vesicles in adrenal medulla and postganglionic sympathetic axons. CHGA is over-expressed in essential hypertension, a complex trait with genetic predisposition. Conversely, the plasma concentration of the catestatin fragment of CHGA is diminished both in established hypertension and in patients’ still-normotensive offspring at genetic risk of developing the disease. These human findings suggest a mechanism whereby diminished catestatin might increase the risk for hypertension. We generated Chga null (Chga-/-) and “humanized” CHGA mice to probe CHGA and catestatin in vivo. Telemetric and tail-cuff studies on blood pressure (BP), transthoracic echocardiography, and hemodynamic studies reveal extreme cardiovascular changes in Chga-/mice: (i) Elevated systolic and diastolic BP (by up to 43.7 mmHg); (ii) Loss of diurnal BP variation; (iv) Increased left ventricular mass (by 72%) and cavity dimensions (by 18–47%); (iii) higher heart rate, left ventricular pressure, ventricular contractility (max dP/dt) and end diastolic pressure and lower R-R intervals (iv) Increased plasma catecholamines and Npy (by 162–214%). Rescue of elevated BP to normalcy was achieved by either exogenous catestatin replacement, or “humanization” of Chga-/mice with transgenic insertion of a human CHGA haplotype. For the first time it is apparent that the human gene has a definitive role in autonomic control of the circulation. The “humanized” transgenic mice provide a model system for functional analyses of the human CHGA gene. Loss of the physiological “brake” catestatin in Chga-/mice, coupled with dysregulation of transmitter storage and release, may act in concert to alter autonomic control of the circulation in vivo, eventuating in hypertension.
miR-30b, Down-Regulated in Gastric Cancer, Promotes Apoptosis and Suppresses Tumor Growth by Targeting Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1

Background Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignant diseases worldwide. Emerging evidence has shown that microRNAs (miRNAs) are associated with tumor development and progression. Our previous studies have revealed that H. pylori infection was able to induce the altered expression of miR-30b in gastric epithelial cells. However, little is known about the potential role of miR-30b in gastric cancer. Methods We analyzed the expression of miR-30b in gastric cancer cell lines and human gastric cancer tissues. We examined the effect of miR-30b mimics on the apoptosis of gastric cancer cells in vitro by flow cytometry (FCM) and caspase-3/7 activity assays. Nude mouse xenograft model was used to determine whether miR-30b is involved in tumorigenesis of gastric cancer. The target of miR-30b was identified by bioinformatics analysis, luciferase assay and Western blot. Finally, we performed the correlation analysis between miR-30b and its target expression in gastric cancer. Results miR-30b was significantly down-regulated in gastric cancer cells and human gastric cancer tissues. Enforced expression of miR-30b promoted the apoptosis of gastric cancer cells in vitro, and miR-30b could significantly inhibit tumorigenicity of gastric cancer by increasing the apoptosis proportion of cancer cells in vivo. Moreover, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) was identified as the potential target of miR-30b, and miR-30b level was inversely correlated with PAI-1 expression in gastric cancer. In addition, silencing of PAI-1 was able to phenocopy the effect of miR-30b overexpression on apoptosis regulation of cancer cells, and overexpression of PAI-1 could suppressed the effect of promoting cell apoptosis by miR-30b, indicating PAI-1 is potentially involved in miR-30b-induced apoptosis on cancer cells. Conclusion miR-30b may function as a novel tumor suppressor gene in gastric cancer by targeting PAI-1 and regulating the apoptosis of cancer cells. miR-30b could serve as a potential biomarker and therapeutic target against gastric cancer.
TEX11 is mutated in infertile men with azoospermia and regulates genome-wide recombination rates in mouse

Genome‐wide recombination is essential for genome stability, evolution, and speciation. Mouse Tex11, an X‐linked meiosis‐specific gene, promotes meiotic recombination and chromosomal synapsis. Here, we report that TEX11 is mutated in infertile men with non‐obstructive azoospermia and that an analogous mutation in the mouse impairs meiosis. Genetic screening of a large cohort of idiopathic infertile men reveals that TEX11 mutations, including frameshift and splicing acceptor site mutations, cause infertility in 1% of azoospermic men. Functional evaluation of three analogous human TEX11 missense mutations in transgenic mouse models identified one mutation (V748A) as a potential infertility allele and found two mutations non‐causative. In the mouse model, an intronless autosomal Tex11 transgene functionally substitutes for the X‐linked Tex11 gene, providing genetic evidence for the X‐to‐autosomal retrotransposition evolution phenomenon. Furthermore, we find that TEX11 protein levels modulate genome‐wide recombination rates in both sexes. These studies indicate that TEX11 alleles affecting expression level or substituting single amino acids may contribute to variations in recombination rates between sexes and among individuals in humans.
The accuracy of blood loss estimation after simulated vaginal delivery.

BACKGROUND Visual blood loss estimation often underestimates blood loss. In this study we sought to determine the effect of calibrated drape markings on blood loss estimation in a simulated vaginal delivery. METHODS Subjects were randomized to estimate simulated blood loss (300, 500, 1000, and 2000 mL) in calibrated or noncalibrated vaginal delivery drapes and then crossover. RESULTS Visual blood loss estimation with noncalibrated drapes underestimated blood loss, with worsening accuracy at larger volumes (16% error at 300 mL to 41% at 2000 mL). The calibrated drape error was <15% at all volumes. CONCLUSIONS Calibrated vaginal delivery drapes improve blood loss estimation.
American Journal of Epidemiology Original Contribution Variation in Child Cognitive Ability by Week of Gestation among Healthy Term Births

The authors investigated variations in cognitive ability by gestational age among 13,824 children at age 6.5 years who were born at term with normal weight, using data from a prospective cohort recruited in 1996–1997 in Belarus. The mean differences in the Wechsler Abbreviated Scales of Intelligence were examined by gestational age in completed weeks and by fetal growth after controlling for maternal and family characteristics. Compared with the score for those born at 39–41 weeks, the full-scale intelligence quotient (IQ) score was 1.7 points (95% confidence interval (CI): À2. 7, À0. 7) lower in children born at 37 weeks and 0.4 points (95% CI: À1.1, 0.02) lower at 38 weeks after controlling for confounders. There was also a graded relation in postterm children: a 0.5-points (95% CI: À2.6, 1.6) lower score at 42 weeks and 6.0 points (95% CI: À15.1, 3.1) lower at 43 weeks. Compared with children born large for gestational age (>90th percentile), children born small for gestational age (<10th percentile) had the lowest IQ, followed by those at the 10th–50th percentile and those at the >50th–90th percentile. These findings suggest that, even among healthy children born at term, cognitive ability at age 6.5 years is lower in those born at 37 or 38 weeks and those with suboptimal fetal growth. Recent studies have shown that pregnancy outcomes such as perinatal death, low 5-minute Apgar score, and maternal hemorrhage vary by gestational age, even at term (1, 2). Zhang and Kramer (3) have found that infant mortality (both neonatal and postneonatal) and neonatal morbidity vary by week of gestation among term births. These findings suggest considerable heterogeneity in outcome among births at or beyond 37 completed weeks. It is well established that children born small for gesta-tional age or preterm (<37 weeks) have lower cognitive ability than their appropriate-for-gestational-age or term counterparts (4–13). It is therefore often assumed that children born at term are homogeneous with respect to long-term cognitive development. Recently, studies have reported a positive association between birth weight and cognitive ability even among children with birth weight within the normal range (14–16), although residual confounding by unmeasured family characteristics may have biased the results (17, 18). Although there are many studies on cognitive ability variations by birth weight, studies to examine the variation by gestational age are very limited. To our knowledge , there are only 2 such studies, but 1 did not adjust for important confounders …
Embryonic-stage-dependent changes in the level of eIF4E-binding proteins during early development of sea urchin embryos

The eukaryotic initiation factor 4E (eIF4E)-binding proteins (4E-BPs) inhibit translation initiation by binding eIF4E and preventing recruitment of the translation machinery to mRNA. We have previously shown that fertilization of sea urchin eggs triggers eIF4E–4E-BP complex dissociation and 4E-BP degradation. Here, we show that microinjection of eIF4E-binding motif peptide into unfertilized eggs delays the onset of the first mitosis triggered by fertilization, demonstrating that dissociation of the eIF4E–4E-BP complex is functionally important for the first mitotic division in sea urchin embryos. We also show by gel filtration analyses that eIF4E is present in unfertilized eggs as an 80 kDa molecular mass complex containing 4E-BP and a new 4E-BP of 40 kDa. Fertilization triggers the dissociation of eIF4E from these two 4E-BPs and triggers the rapid recruitment of eIF4E into a high-molecular-mass complex. Release of eIF4E from the two 4E-BPs is correlated with a decrease in the total level of both 4E-BPs following fertilization. Abundance of the two 4E-BPs has been monitored during embryonic development. The level of the two proteins remains very low during the rapid cleavage stage of early development and increases 8 hours after fertilization. These results demonstrate that these two 4E-BPs are down- and upregulated during the embryonic development of sea urchins. Consequently, these data suggest that eIF4E availability to other partners represents an important determinant of the early development of sea urchin embryos.