Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Linking a San Pedro Bay Forecast to Regional Labor Markets

Using time series forecasting techniques, the authors develop multiple forecasts of inbound container traffic through the San Pedro Bay Ports. These forecasts, combined with panel data labor market models, allow us to forecast the impact of declining freight volumes on total employment, transportation employment, and transportation payroll in Los Angeles and Orange Counties and the Inland Empire. The authors find that the decline in traffic is associated with a decline of nearly 330,000 jobs in 2009 and 147,000 jobs in 2010 in the 4-county region. Transportation employment is estimated to have declined by nearly 14,000 jobs in 2009 due to declining port activity and forecast to decline by another 5,000 in 2010.
Continental evaporites and the search for evidence of life on Mars

Continental evaporites are deposits that originate from the evaporation of saline waters in the low areas of saline lakes from all continents, except Europe, and mainly consist of chloride, sulphate and potash minerals. In recent years, the discovery on the Martian surface of hydrated salt minerals, including sulphates and chlorides, interpreted as deriving from the desiccation of preexisting large bodies of water, such as lakes, has provided further convincing evidence of liquid water activity on the surface of Mars and, consequently, it has reinforced the plausibility of finding life. Because evaporites require short‐term aqueous processes for their formation, they can trap and preserve over geologic times a biological record made up of halophilic extremophiles—such as microalgae, bacteria, and their remains—that recent research on Earth has shown to be characterized by unexpectedly high biodiversity. This record may consist of varying types of fossils, including morphological fossils, chemofossils and biominerals. As a consequence, continental evaporite environments and their saline deposits are now a primary target for the near future astrobiology missions devoted to the search for fossil Martian life. Lacustrine evaporite deposits and minerals have, therefore, been identified as primary targets for the NASA–ESA joint programme of the Mars sample return, planned for the end of the current decade. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Targeting of the Brucella suis Virulence Factor Histidinol Dehydrogenase by Histidinol Analogues Results in Inhibition of Intramacrophagic Multiplication of the Pathogen

ABSTRACT Brucella suis histidinol dehydrogenase (HDH) can be efficiently targeted by substrate analogues. The growth of this pathogen in minimal medium was inhibited and the multiplication in human macrophages was totally abolished in the presence of the drugs. These effects have been shown to be correlated with the previously described inhibition of Brucella HDH activity.
Effect of Soil Plasticity on Cyclic Response

A study on the influence of the plasticity index (PI) on the cyclic stress‐strain parameters of saturated soils needed for site‐response evaluations and seismic microzonation is presented. Ready‐to‐use charts are included, showing the effect of PI on the location of the modulus reduction curve G/Gmax versus cyclic shear strain γc, and on the material damping ratio λ versus γc curve. The charts are based on experimental data from 16 publications encompassing normally and overconsolidated clays (OCR=1-15), as well as sands. It is shown that PI is the main factor controlling G/Gmax and λ for a wide variety of soils; if for a given γc PI increases, G/Gmax rises and λ is reduced. Similar evidence is presented showing the influence of PI on the rate of modulus degradation with the number of cycles in normally consolidated clays. It is concluded that soils with higher plasticity tend to have a more linear cyclic stress‐strain response at small strains and to degrade less at larger γc than soils with a lower PI.
Principal components of sound systems: An exercise in multivariate statistical typology

Phoneme inventories of the worlds languages as depicted by the UPSID database (Maddieson and Precoda 1990) are analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques of principal components analysis and k-means and hierarchical clustering. The first two meaningful principal components, representing dimensions that account for the most variance in sound systems but are not caused by differences in typological frequencies of phonemes, are found to separate languages into three large clusters, distinguished by glottal articulations present in the stop inventory and the sonority of other types of sounds present in the language. Clustering analyses, which automatically categorize sound systems and phonemes, are shown to reveal both areal groupings of languages, for instance, categorizing together genetically unrelated languages of India, and groupings of phonemes that are often interpretable in featural terms, especially when clustering analyses are conducted within phoneme categories defined by manner of articulation / sonority.
Gauge Invariant 'monopoles' and Color Confinement Mechanism Gauge Invariant 'monopoles' and Color Confinement Mechanism

The dual Meissner effect is described and numerically observed in a gauge-invariant way in lattice Monte-Carlo simulations of pure SU(2) QCD. A gauge-invariant monopole-like quantity on the lattice is defined by a gauge-invariant Abelian-like field strength. The Abelian-like field strength is expressed in terms of a unit-vector in color space which is constructed by a non-Abelian field strength itself. It is just equal to the absolute value of the corresponding non-Abelian field strength except for the sign. In this note we show the theoretical background and most numerical results will be published in a separate report [1] in this conference. c Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.
Quality control and safety assessment of BCG vaccines in the post-genomic era

A hundred and five years ago, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin began a daunting task, which is unmatched even today, that led to the most widely used vaccine in human history. Despite a century of scientific advances, BCG (an acronym for Bacillus Calmette–Guérin) remains the only vaccine for prevention of tuberculosis. Due to the fact that the use of BCG vaccines will continue, either as a stand-alone or as a prime vaccine in prime-boost immunization strategies, the World Health Organization (WHO) has underlined the necessity for further work toward better characterization, evaluation and quality control of the BCG vaccine, taking into account recent advances in genetics and molecular biology. The potential benefit of such improved characterization could be addressed to better and easier differentiation between sub-strains used by different manufacturers. It may help to ensure consistency of production in terms of genetic stability and it may also help the clinical evaluation of new antituberculosis vaccines. Last but not least, the state-of-the-art technologies could facilitate the quality control performed by the manufacturers and by National Control Authorities as well.
STFT-based speech enhancement by reconstructing the harmonics

A novel Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) based speech enhancement method is introduced. This method enhances the magnitude spectrum of a noisy speech segment. The new idea that is used in this method is to basically reconstruct the harmonics at the multiples of the fundamental frequency ( 0 F ) rather than trying to improve them. The harmonics are produced, in the magnitude spectrum, using the knowledge of the window function we are using for the STFT. These harmonics are then scaled and laid on multiples of 0 F . Experimental results prove the effectiveness of this enhancement method in various noisy conditions and various SNR ratios.
Frequency of B lymphocytes responsive to anti-immunoglobulin

The frequency of murine B lymphocytes that respond to antibodies directed against membrane IgM was measured. These anti-mu antibodies induced all, or almost all, resting B cells to enlarge over the first 24 h of stimulation. This probably represents the transition from the resting state (G0) to active transit through the cell cycle. In contrast, only a fraction of these cells, approximately 60% for BDF1 mice, continued through the cell cycle into S phase. This is consistent with previous experiments that had suggested there were some types of B cells that did not proliferate in response to anti-mu. The results presented here demonstrate that many, perhaps all, of these nonresponding B cells, both from normal mice and from mice with the xid defect, actually do respond to the presence of anti-mu by going through early parts of the cell cycle. These cells appear to become blocked at some point before the beginning of S phase, perhaps requiring a signal from a T cell or a macrophage to continue through the cell cycle. Thus, the role of antigen may be to prepare all B cells for proliferation. Different subpopulations of B cells may then require different regulatory signals before actually proliferating or before differentiating into antibody-secreting cells.
Quenched law of large numbers for branching Brownian motion in a random medium

We study a spatial branching model, where the underlying motion is d -dimensional ( d ≥ 1) Brownian motion and the branching rate is affected by a random collection of reproduction suppressing sets dubbed mild obstacles . The main result of this paper is the quenched law of large numbers for the population for all d ≥ 1. We also show that the branching Brownian motion with mild obstacles spreads less quickly than ordinary branching Brownian motion by giving an upper estimate on its speed. When the underlying motion is an arbitrary diffusion process, we obtain a dichotomy for the quenched local growth that is independent of the Poissonian intensity. More general offspring distributions (beyond the dyadic one considered in the main theorems) as well as mild obstacle models for superprocesses are also discussed. Résumé. le mouvement de base est un processus de diffusion arbitraire nous obtenons une dichotomie pour la croissance locale “quenchée” qui est indépendante de l’intensité Poissonnienne. Le cas de distributions plus générales du nombre de descendants (autre que le cas dyadique considéré dans les théorème principaux), ainsi que des modèles d’obstacles moux pour des superprocessus, sont aussi discutés. MSC:
The Dinosaurs and the Ring

Cognitive models based on rules and symbols typically require a high degree of handwiring. One way of avoiding the hand-wiring of rules is to rely on connectionist networks for modeling some of the core processes in language acquisition. However, connectionist models have problems with scalability and generativity. Ideally, we want a model that will keep the strengths of both symbolic and connectionist models, while overcoming their respective shortcomings. One model that may be able to do this is a connectionist extension of the Competition Model which relies on the lexical item and lexical categories as ways of coordinating processing and learning on the levels of syntax, audition, articulation, and semantics.
Study of inheritable mutations in von Neumann self-reproducing automata using the GOLLY simulator

This article involves the study of inheritable mutations in a von Neumann self-reproducing automaton, making use of the GOLLY cellular automata simulator. Multi-point mutations were done on the tape which holds the description of the self-reproducer so as to observe the effects over subsequent generations. Von Neumann said that ‘Self reproduction includes the ability to undergo inheritable mutations as well as the ability to make another organism like the original. ’ One of the central models used to study self-reproduction is cellular automata. Evolution relies on sources of variability, such as the results of mutation. This occurs when a system reproduces itself with inheritable variation, resulting in possibly more complex offspring. Subsequent offspring generations may inherit complex attributes from the parent generation during reproduction, and this is shown here constructively.
Characterisation of Poly vinyl alcohol (PVA) / Silver nitrate nanomembranes for their suitability in wound dressing applications

Special wound care product was developed using Poly vinyl alcohol (PVA) blended with Silver nitrate. Electrospinning technique was adopted to produce PVA/Silver nitrate nanomembranes, which was used as wound dressings. PVA/Silver nitrate wound dressings (PSNWD) have high moisture vapour transmission property and good antimicrobial activity. PSNWD substrates have mild cytotoxicity reactivity and have excellent odour absorbing capability. PVA/Silver nitrate wound dressing do not cause skin irritation even after 72 hours of contact with the wound and the time taken for wound healing while using PSNWD is just 50% of that in the case of an open wound. KeywordsCytotoxicity, Electrospinning, nanomembranes, Poly vinyl alcohol (PVA), Silver nitrate and wound dressing.
Input-Based Dynamic Reconfiguration of Approximate Arithmetic Units for Video Encoding

The field of approximate computing has received significant attention from the research community in the past few years, especially in the context of various signal processing applications. Image and video compression algorithms, such as JPEG, MPEG, and so on, are particularly attractive candidates for approximate computing, since they are tolerant of computing imprecision due to human imperceptibility, which can be exploited to realize highly power-efficient implementations of these algorithms. However, existing approximate architectures typically fix the level of hardware approximation statically and are not adaptive to input data. For example, if a fixed approximate hardware configuration is used for an MPEG encoder (i.e., a fixed level of approximation), the output quality varies greatly for different input videos. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a reconfigurable approximate architecture for MPEG encoders that optimizes power consumption with the goal of maintaining a particular Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) threshold for any video. Toward this end, we design reconfigurable adder/subtractor blocks (RABs), which have the ability to modulate their degree of approximation, and subsequently integrate these blocks in the motion estimation and discrete cosine transform modules of the MPEG encoder. We propose two heuristics for automatically tuning the approximation degree of the RABs in these two modules during runtime based on the characteristics of each individual video. Experimental results show that our approach of dynamically adjusting the degree of hardware approximation based on the input video respects the given quality bound (PSNR degradation of 1%-10%) across different videos while achieving a power saving up to 38% over a conventional nonapproximated MPEG encoder architecture. Note that although the proposed reconfigurable approximate architecture is presented for the specific case of an MPEG encoder, it can be easily extended to other DSP applications.
Channel-Aware Adaptive Quantization Method for Source Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper considers the problem of source localization using quantized observations in wireless sensor networks where, due to bandwidth constraint, each sensor's observation is usually quantized into one bit of information. First, a channel-aware adaptive quantization scheme for target location estimation is proposed and local sensor nodes dynamically adjust their quantization thresholds according to the position-based information sequence. The novelty of the proposed approach comes from the fact that the scheme not only adopts the distributed adaptive quantization instead of the conventional fixed quantization, but also incorporates the statistics of imperfect wireless channels between sensors and the fusion center (binary symmetric channels). Furthermore, the appropriate maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), the performance metric Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB), and a sufficient condition for the Fisher information matrix being positive definite are derived, respectively. Simulation results are presented to show that the appropriated CRLB is less than the fixed quantization channel-aware CRLB and the proposed MLE will approach their CRLB when the number of sensors is large enough.
Cirrus Cloud Radiative Forcing Derived from Synergetic Use of MODIS Analyses and Ground-Based Observations

We have been performing radiative budget measurements at a ground-based observatory located on Fukue Island. In this study, we analyzed the data from instruments installed in the observatory and the data observed by MODIS, the satellite-borne imager, to evaluate cirrus cloud radiative forcing (CRF). The result shows that CRF took a large positive value as 127.98 W m-2 at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) and a small positive value as 13.2 W m-2 at the surface. As a result, it was found that optically very thin cirrus clouds exert a strong warming effect on the Earth's system and a weak warming effect on the Earth's surface when aerosols are not taken into account.
A Specification Language for Hierarchical Text Classification ∗

Hierarchical text classification refers to assigning text documents to the categories in a given category tree based on their content. With large number of categories organized as a tree, hierarchical text classification helps users to find information more quickly and accurately. Nevertheless, hierarchical text classification methods in the past have often been constructed in a proprietary manner. The construction steps often involve human efforts and are not completely automated. In this paper, we therefore propose a specification language known as HCL (Hierarchical Classification Language). HCL is designed to describe a hierarchical classification method including the definition of a category tree and training of classifiers associated with the categories. Using HCL, a hierarchical classification method can be materialized easily with the help of a method generator system.
Cell biology and immunology of malaria

Summary: Malaria is a vector‐borne infectious disease caused by unicellular parasites of the genus Plasmodium. These obligate intracellular parasites have the unique capacity to infect and replicate within erythrocytes, which are terminally differentiated host cells that lack antigen presentation pathways. Prior to the cyclic erythrocytic infections that cause the characteristic clinical symptoms of malaria, the parasite undergoes an essential and clinically silent expansion phase in the liver. By infecting privileged host cells, employing programs of complex life stage conversions and expressing varying immunodominant antigens, Plasmodium parasites have evolved mechanisms to downmodulate protective immune responses against ongoing and even future infections. Consequently, anti‐malaria immunity develops only gradually over many years of repeated and multiple infections in endemic areas. The identification of immune correlates of protection among the abundant non‐protective host responses remains a research priority. Understanding the molecular and immunological mechanisms of the crosstalk between the parasite and the host is a prerequisite for the rational discovery and development of a safe, affordable, and protective anti‐malaria vaccine.
Rare case of tibial hemimelia, preaxial polydactyly, and club foot

A seven-month old female presented with left tibial hemimelia (or congenital tibial aplasia; Weber type VIIb, Jones et al type 1a), seven-toed preaxial polydactyly, and severe club foot (congenital talipes equinovarus). Definitive amputation surgery disarticulated the lower limb at the knee. This case report describes the anatomical findings of a systematic post-amputation examination of the lower limb’s superficial dissection, X-rays, and computed tomography (CT) scans. From the X-rays and CT scans, we found curved and overlapping preaxial supernumerary toes, hypoplastic first metatarsal, lack of middle and distal phalanges in one supernumerary toe, three tarsal bones, hypoplastic middle phalanx and no distal phalanx for fourth toe, and no middle or distal phalanges for fifth toe. The fibula articulated with the anteromedial calcaneus and the tibia was completely absent. We identified numerous muscles and nerves in the superficial dissection that are described in the results section of the case report. Due to the rarity of this combination of anatomical findings, descriptions of such cases are very infrequent in the literature.
Granites built by sheeting in a fault stepover (the Sanabria Massifs, Variscan Orogen, NW Spain)

The Sanabria region (Central Iberian Zone, Variscan belt of Spain) shows an asymmetric thermal dome marked by migmatites accompanied by the Ribadelago and the Sotillo plutons. These small plutons display pronounced mineralogical variations. Biotite granodiorites and tonalites prevail, and granites and gabbros are common. Both plutons are confined in the releasing stepover of a transpressional shear zone that strikes 120°E and dips 70°SW. Most of the igneous rocks form sheets parallel to the shear zone. Magnetic foliations and lineations in the igneous rocks are parallel, respectively, to the shear bands and stretching lineations observed in the shear zone. The formation of these igneous sheets at high angle to the main axis of the regional field stress is explained by a combination of the fault‐valve behaviour of the shear zone with the power of melt overpressure to open and ascend through previously formed planar structures, like S‐ or C‐planes.