Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
‘A song goes round the world’: the German Schlager, as an organ of experience

In recent work in film and cultural studies, the set of social configurations, practices of everyday life, and ideological formations that constitute twentieth-century ‘modernity’ have been increasingly the subject of research and debate. Fuelled by a renewed interest in critical phenomenologies of modernity, most prominently the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, scholars have focused the debate on the specific historicity of visual culture in the early years of the twentieth century, in order to illuminate the contradictory and fragmented nature of modern mass cultural experience. Fusing the theoretical traditions of critical theory with the empirical and theoretical interest in contradiction and contestation typical of cultural studies, not only does this debate open new perspectives for considering the problem of mass and/or ‘popular’ visual culture, it can also contribute to rethinking the way we discuss the historicity of popular music. Conversely, a more precise understanding of the historicity of popular music practice in modern mass culture, its institutions and modes of experience, can broaden the scope of this debate beyond the spectacles of visual culture to the ‘attractions’ of the acoustic.
Ultra-low energy switches based on silicon photonic crystals for on-chip optical interconnects

Although switching techniques based on charge injection in silicon have progressed greatly in recent years, switching energies are still above 10 fJ/bit, which is considered the threshold for practical implementation in on-chip optical interconnects. This is due primarily to silicon's relatively weak electro-optic response, as well as the large physical extent of existing switching geometries, both of which increase the energy required to achieve switching. By using a resonant approach in which the optical mode is spatially tightly confined, however, the volume of active material is decreased, resulting in reduced switching energy. In this paper we report on the use of a thin MOS capacitor to inject charge into a resonator based on a photonic crystal microcavity. By injecting charge only into the volume in which the optical mode is localized, switching energy can be reduced below 1 fJ/bit. The index shift available (Δn ~ 0.001) allows the use of a relatively low-Q resonator (Q ~ 550), enabling high optical bandwidth of 100 Gbps with a device footprint below 25 μm2.
Reconfigurable monopole antenna with controllable band-notched performance for UWB communications

A novel printed monopole antenna with reconfigurable band-notched performance is designed and manufactured. In this design, the proposed antenna can operate from 3.19 to 13.21 GHz with two rejection bands at 3.47-4.23 and 5.11-5.94 GHz, covering all the 5.2/5.8GHz WLAN, 3.5/5.5 GHz WiMAX and 4 GHz C bands. Simulated and experimental results obtained for this antenna with a reconfigurable function show that it exhibits good radiation behaviour within the UWB frequency range.
Modulation of Chromatin Boundary Activities by Nucleosome-Remodeling Activities in Drosophila melanogaster

ABSTRACT Chromatin boundaries facilitate independent gene regulation by insulating genes from the effects of enhancers or organized chromatin. However, the mechanisms of boundary action are not well understood. To investigate whether boundary function depends on a higher order of chromatin organization, we examined the function of several Drosophila melanogaster insulators in cells with reduced chromatin-remodeling activities. We found that knockdown of NURF301 and ISWI, key components of the nucleosome-remodeling factor (NURF), synergistically disrupted the enhancer-blocking function of Fab7 and SF1 and augmented the function of Fab8. Mutations in Nurf301/Ebx and Iswi also affected the function of these boundaries in vivo. We further show that ISWI was localized on the endogenous Fab7 and Fab8 insulators and that NURF knockdown resulted in a marked increase in the nucleosome occupancy at these insulator sites. In contrast to the effect of NURF knockdown, reduction in dMi-2, the ATPase component of the Drosophila nucleosome-remodeling and deacetylation (NuRD) complex, augmented Fab7 and suppressed Fab8. Our results provide the first evidence that higher-order chromatin organization influences the enhancer-blocking activity of chromatin boundaries. In particular, the NURF and NuRD nucleosome-remodeling complexes may regulate Hox expression by modulating the function of boundaries in these complexes. The unique responses by different classes of boundaries to changes in the chromatin environment may be indicative of their distinct mechanisms of action, which may influence their placement in the genome and selection during evolution.
Air-Clad Holmium-Doped Silica Fiber Laser

We report the design, fabrication, and operation of an air-clad holmium-doped fiber laser that was manufactured by directly milling the rare-earth-doped preform. This silica fiber laser operates at 2.1 μm with a slope efficiency of 49.7%, and is in-band pumped with a 1.94-μm thulium fiber laser. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an air-clad holmium-doped fiber laser.
Vision and violence: Photographies of war in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia

During a tour around Ondjiva in southern Angola in July 1999, the town's official Administrator took me to the building that now occupies the site of the former SWAPO headquarters in the early 1970s. Not far from the reconstructed church and still-devastated block of offices in the central square of Ondjiva, the Administrator explained that it was here, in the street outside the SWAPO office, that his brother had been killed during a bombing raid by the South Africans. The office had been completely destroyed and, after reckoning the death-toll, SWAPO moved its official operations elsewhere. I asked him how both those Namibians and Angolans present were affected by the bombing raid, and how they explained its occurrence. How did they account for the accuracy of South Africa's knowledge of the target, which enabled them to inflict so much damage? The Administrator's reply was unequivocal: people believed that it must have been spies who told the Boers where the office was located. Spies, betrayal and leakage of information had caused the destruction in Ondjiva and the death of his brother.
Masking by combination bands: estimation of the levels of the combination bands (n+1)f 1 -nf h .

In a previous paper (Greenwood, 1972a), the measurement of masking by bands of noise of external origin led to determinations of signal/masker ratio that are applied in the present paper to the task of estimating combination band levels. Estimates of the levels of combination bands, given by the expression (n + 1)fl − nfh, were made by using the maximum masked threshold, read from a masking pattern produced by a given band, to calculate the denominator of the previously obtained signal‐to‐masker ratio. The shapes of the masking patterns and the estimates of level lead to the following conclusions: (a) Comparison of the masking effects of combination bands and bands of external origin further demonstrates that to assume that combination components, once generated, are not equivalent to external stimuli in ultimate loci and subsequent effects in the cochlea would require complex ad hoc explanations to account for the indistinguishable masking effects produced by the two kinds of bands. (b) Combination bands.
Acoustic interference cancellation for a voice-driven interface in smart TVs

A novel method is proposed to improve the voice recognition performance by suppressing acoustic interferences that add nonlinear distortion to a target recording signal when received by the recognition device. The proposed method is expected to provide the best performance in smart TV environments, where a remote control collects command speech by the internal microphone and performs automatic voice recognition, and the secondary microphone equipped in a TV set provides the reference signal for the background noise source. Due to the transmission channel, the original interference is corrupted nonlinearly, and the conventional speech enhancement techniques such as beamforming and blind signal separation are not applicable. The proposed method first equalizes the interference in the two microphones by maximizing the instantaneous correlation between the nonlinearly related target recording and reference signal, and suppresses the equalized interference. To obtain an optimal estimation of the equalization filter, a method for detecting instantaneous activity of interference is also proposed. The validity of the proposed method is proved by the improvement in automatic voice recognition performance in a simulated TV room where loud TV sounds or babbling speech interfere in a user's commanding speech.
The Relationship between Body Esteem and Hope and Mental Health in Breast Cancer Patients after Mastectomy

Background: Breast cancer and its treatment, including mastectomy, can cause feelings of mutilation, depreciation in the value of the body, reduction in attractiveness, and lead to mental disorders and hopelessness. Objective: The present study aimed to determine the relationship between appreciating the body, hope and mental health in women with breast cancer after mastectomy. Materials and Methods: This study was a descriptive study of 100 breast cancer patients who had undergone mastectomy and referred to the Sayed Al-Shohada Medical Center in Isfahan, Iran. The subjects were selected by convenient sampling. Data gathering tools were the Body Esteem Scale (BES), Herth Hope Index (HHI), and Symptom Checklist 25 (SCL-25) mental health questionnaire. Data analysis was performed using SPSS software. Results: Most of the patients had low body esteem. There was a significant direct linear relationship between body esteem and hope and mental health. This relationship was stronger between valuing the body and hope. Conclusion: Body esteem has a significant linear relationship with hope and mental health.
Waxy and non-waxy barley cultivars exhibit differences in the targeting and catalytic activity of GBSS1a

&NA; Amylose synthesis is strictly associated with activity of granule‐bound starch synthase (GBSS) enzymes. Among several crops there are cultivars containing starch types with either little or no amylose known as near‐waxy or waxy. This (near) amylose‐free phenotype is associated with a single locus (waxy) which has been mapped to GBSS‐type genes in different crops. Most waxy varieties are a result of either low or no expression of a GBSS gene. However, there are some waxy cultivars where the GBSS enzymes are expressed normally. For these types, single nucleotide polymorphisms have been hypothesized to represent amino‐acid substitutions leading to loss of catalytic activity. We here confirm that the HvGBSSIa enzyme from one such waxy barley variety, CDC_Alamo, has a 90% reduction in catalytic activity. We also engineered plants with expression of transgenic C‐terminal green fluorescent protein‐tagged HvGBSSIa of both the non‐waxy type and of the CDC_Alamo type to monitor their subcellular localization patterns in grain endosperm. HvGBSSIa from non‐waxy cultivars was found to localize in discrete concentric spheres strictly within starch granules. In contrast, HvGBSSIa from waxy CDC_Alamo showed deficient starch targeting mostly into unknown subcellular bodies of 0.5‐3 &mgr;m in size, indicating that the waxy phenotype of CDC_Alamo is associated with deficient targeting of HvGBSSIa into starch granules.
Taking stock and planning for the next decade: Realistic prospects for stem cell therapies for the nervous system

In thinking about the practical application of stem cell biology to clinical situations—particularly for the central nervous system (CNS)—it is instructive to remember that the neural stem cell (NSC) field—as a prototype for somatic stem cells in general—emerged as the unanticipated byproduct of investigations by developmental neurobiologists into fundamental aspects of neural determination, commitment, and plasticity. Stem cell behavior is ultimately an expression of developmental principles, an alluring vestige from the more plastic and generative stages of organogenesis. In attempting to apply stem cell biology therapeutically, it is instructive always to bear in mind what role the stem cell plays in development and to what cues it was “designed” to respond in trying to understand the “logic” behind its behavior (both what investigators want to see and what investigators do not want to see). Furthermore, in transplantation paradigms, the interaction between engrafted NSCs and recipient host is a dynamic, complex, ongoing reciprocal interaction where both entities are constantly in flux. In this review, we propose a “roadmap” to the clinic, with a particular emphasis on flagging the “potholes” and “speed bumps” through which we must navigate. Despite the admonitions to be circumspect, we also suggest disease processes that may be within the grasp of proven stem cell properties and might be approachable in the relatively near future. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
An Experimental Evaluation and Comparison of Explicit Force Control Strategies for Robotic Manipulators

This paper presents an experimental evaluation and comparison of basic strategies that have been proposed for force control of robot manipulators. This experimental review of force control methodologies is unique in its breadth ¿ never has such a complete spectrum of strategies been experimentally compared on the same system. The commonality amongst the experiments has permitted the ability to objectively compare and contrast these strategies, and draw conclusions about the efficacy of each. As will be seen, the results support our previous analysis and show the superiority of integral force control for force trajectory tracking.
Iterative wavelet thresholding for rapid MRI reconstruction

According to the developments in the field of compressed sampling and and sparse recovery, one might take advantage of the sparsity of an object, as an additional a priori knowledge about the object, to reconstruct it from fewer samples than that needed by the traditional sampling strategies. Since most magnetic resonance (MR) images are sparse in some domain, in this work we consider the problem of MR reconstruction and how one could apply this idea to accelerate the process of MR image/map acquisition. In particular, based on the Paupolis-Gerchgerg algorithm, an iterative thresholding algorithm for reconstruction of MR images from limited k-space observations is proposed. The proposed method takes advantage of the sparsity of most MR images in the wavelet domain. Initializing with a minimum-energy reconstruction, the object of interest is reconstructed by going through a sequence of thresholding and recovery iterations. Furthermore, MR studies often involve acquisition of multiple images in time that are highly correlated. This correlation can be used as additional knowledge on the object beside the sparsity to further reduce the reconstruction time. The performance of the proposed algorithms is experimentally evaluated and compared to other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, we show that the quality of reconstruction is increased compared to total variation (TV) regularization, and the conventional Papoulis-Gerchberg algorithm both in the absence and in the presence of noise. Also, phantom experiments show good accuracy in the reconstruction of relaxation maps from a set of highly undersampled k-space observations.
Stone artefact manufacture at Natunuku, Votua, Kulu and Ugaga, Fiji

Pacific flaked-stone assemblages after ca. 3000 years ago are often portrayed as simple, expedient, homogeneous and typologically depauperate. Recent technological analyses, however, are beginning to reveal significant variation in the types of reduction strategies employed in different regions and sites, as well as in the degree to which raw materials of various origins were reduced, conserved and curated (Halsey 1995; Sheppard 1992, 1993; Swete Kelly 2001). These studies have largely been concerned with identifying the mechanisms and quantities in which raw materials (but typically obsidian) were distributed across the Pacific at different times. Yet there is a growing concern that flaked-stone assemblages of all kinds, and not simply those derived from long-distance exchange, should be better described and integrated into current research questions in Pacific prehistory. Such questions include the tempo and economic basis of Lapita expansion, changing mobility, settlement and subsistence patterns, Lapita and postLapita innovation, and the continuity and nature of local and regional interaction. Although Allen and Bell (1988) called for greater reporting of basic information on aspects of Pacific assemblage variability nearly 20 years ago, there is still an alarming lack of data on such basic issues as the types, origins and proportions of raw materials found in assemblages, the form in which they were procured and imported, the various reduction techniques employed, the types and abundance of technological categories represented, their size and form, the function of stone tools, and the impact of various taphonomic processes on assemblage size and composition.
O efeito da eliminação de doenças crônicas na população idosa: a compressão e a expansão da morbidade

Introduction : In the context of the aging process, a key issue i to assess whether strategies to prevent chronic diseases may contribu te to the increase in years lived in good health among elderly individuals. Objective: To evaluate whether elimination of certain chronic diseases can lead to the compres sion of morbidity, in the elderly. Methods: Analytical cross-sectional survey, based on offic ial data for the city of São Paulo, in 2000, and data obtained from the SABE stu dy. Sullivan’s method was used for the calculation of disability-free life expecta ncy (DFLE). Cause-deleted disability prevalence was estimated using multiple logistic re gression model. Cause-deleted probabilities of dying were derived with the causeelimination life-table technique, considering the independence of the causes of base d on the approach proposed by Nusselder and co-workers. Results: The greatest gains in DFLE, with the elimination of chronic diseases, occurred in women, leading to a process of absolute compression of morbidity. Among individuals of a more advanced age, gains in DFLE occurred due to a relative compression of morbidity process. Among men aged 75 years, all diseases eliminated, except heart disease and hyper tension, led to a process of absolute expansion of morbidity, but simultaneously , to a relative compression of morbidity. If eliminated, heart disease was the con dition that would most lead to the compression of morbidity in both genders. Conclusion: The elimination of chronic diseases in the elderly population could lead to th e compression of morbidity in men and women at both 60 years of age and in 75 years o f age or older.
Evaluation of clinical diagnostic criteria for neurofibromatosis 2

Background: Four sets of clinical diagnostic criteria for neurofibromatosis 2 (NF2) have been developed by groups of expert clinicians, but sensitivity has never been formally assessed. The sets of criteria differ for people without bilateral vestibular schwannomas, which are pathognomonic for NF2. Objective: To empirically evaluate the four existing sets of clinical diagnostic criteria for NF2. Methods: The study was based on 163 of 403 people in the United Kingdom NF2 registry (41%) who presented without bilateral vestibular schwannomas. The authors applied the sets of criteria to each person at initial assessment and at the most recent clinical evaluation (mean ± SE length of follow-up, 13 ± 1 years). Results: In people with “definite NF2” and a negative family history of NF2, the 1987 US NIH and 1991 NIH criteria each identify 78% of people at the most recent clinical evaluation but 0% at initial assessment. The National Neurofibromatosis Foundation (NNFF) criteria and the Manchester criteria each identify higher proportions at both time points (NNFF criteria, 91% and 10%; Manchester criteria, 93% and 14%), but the proportions at initial assessment are still low. Conclusions: None of the existing sets of criteria are adequate at initial assessment for diagnosing people who present without bilateral vestibular schwannomas as having NF2, particularly people with a negative family history of NF2. The authors recommend that a single, revised set of diagnostic criteria be devised to replace all of the existing sets of criteria.
Mutual protection of ribosomal proteins L5 and L11 from degradation is essential for p53 activation upon ribosomal biogenesis stress

Impairment of ribosomal biogenesis can activate the p53 protein independently of DNA damage. The ability of ribosomal proteins L5, L11, L23, L26, or S7 to bind Mdm2 and inhibit its ubiquitin ligase activity has been suggested as a critical step in p53 activation under these conditions. Here, we report that L5 and L11 are particularly important for this response. Whereas several other newly synthesized ribosomal proteins are degraded by proteasomes upon inhibition of Pol I activity by actinomycin D, L5 and L11 accumulate in the ribosome-free fraction where they bind to Mdm2. This selective accumulation of free L5 and L11 is due to their mutual protection from proteasomal degradation. Furthermore, the endogenous, newly synthesized L5 and L11 continue to be imported into nucleoli even after nucleolar disruption and colocalize with Mdm2, p53, and promyelocytic leukemia protein. This suggests that the disrupted nucleoli may provide a platform for L5- and L11-dependent p53 activation, implying a role for the nucleolus in p53 activation by ribosomal biogenesis stress. These findings may have important implications with respect to understanding the pathogenesis of diseases caused by impaired ribosome biogenesis.
Curcumin‐induced apoptosis in ovarian carcinoma cells is p53‐independent and involves p38 mitogen‐activated protein kinase activation and downregulation of Bcl‐2 and survivin expression and Akt signaling

New cytotoxic agents are urgently needed for the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer because of the poor long‐term response of this disease to conventional chemotherapy. Curcumin, obtained from the rhizome of Curcuma longa, has potent anticancer activity; however, the mechanism of curcumin‐induced cytotoxicity in ovarian cancer cells remains a mystery. In this study we show that curcumin exhibited time‐ and dose‐dependent cytotoxicity against monolayer cultures of ovarian carcinoma cell lines with differing p53 status (wild‐type p53: HEY, OVCA429; mutant p53: OCC1; null p53: SKOV3). In addition, p53 knockdown or p53 inhibition did not diminish curcumin killing of HEY cells, confirming p53‐independent cytotoxicity. Curcumin also killed OVCA429, and SKOV3 cells grown as multicellular spheroids. Nuclear condensation and fragmentation, as well as DNA fragmentation and poly (ADP‐ribose) polymerase‐1 cleavage in curcumin‐treated HEY cells, indicated cell death by apoptosis. Procaspase‐3, procaspase‐8, and procaspase‐9 cleavage, in addition to cytochrome c release and Bid cleavage into truncated Bid, revealed that curcumin activated both the extrinsic and intrinsic pathways of apoptosis. Bax expression was unchanged but Bcl‐2, survivin, phosphorylated Akt (on serine 473), and total Akt were downregulated in curcumin‐treated HEY cells. Curcumin also activated p38 mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) without altering extracellular signal‐regulated kinase 1/2 activity. We conclude that p53‐independent curcumin‐induced apoptosis in ovarian carcinoma cells involves p38 MAPK activation, ablation of prosurvival Akt signaling, and reduced expression of the antiapoptotic proteins Bcl‐2 and survivin. These data provide a mechanistic rationale for the potential use of curcumin in the treatment of ovarian cancer. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.