Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combat with Black Hole attack in AODV routing protocol

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous network that consists of mobile nodes that communicate with each other over wireless links. In the absence of a fixed infrastructure, nodes have to cooperate in order to provide the necessary network functionality. One of the principal routing protocols used in Ad hoc networks is AODV (Ad hoc on demand Distance Vector) protocol. The security of the AODV protocol is threaded by a particular type of attack called ‘Black Hole’ attack. In this attack a malicious node advertises itself as having the shortest path to the destination node. To combat with black hole attack, it is proposed to wait and check the replies from all the neighboring nodes to find a safe route but this approach suffers from high delay. In this paper, an approach is proposed to combat the Black hole attack by using negotiation with neighbors who claim to have a route to destination. the Simulation's results show that the proposed protocol provides better security and also better performance in terms of packet delivery than the conventional AODV in the presence of Black holes with minimal additional delay and Overhead.
NEW EVIDENCE ON SHARE PRICES AND THE STOCK MARKET TRENDS: A CASE OF SELECTED US FIRMS, THE S&P 500 AND THE DOW JONES

Analysis of share prices and stock market indexes has actually attracted the attention of financial analysts, capital market participants and researchers alike. This study is based on share price data on selected companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange as well the market activities of major stock market indexes in the US. The data collated were on monthly basis from January 2000 to February 2017. Trends of these series were plotted and further emphasis highlighted with a descriptive statistics. Share prices and stock market performance trends over the period appear similar. There were perceived signs of stability between January 2000 and 2008:Q2. However, the adverse effects of the 2008 global financial crisis were visible and significant as all the series nosedived, notably between 2008:Q3 and 2009:Q2. From our evidence, relative recovery from the crisis began to be felt from July 2009. Thereafter, the pace of growth in performances across the series has been quite impressive. Both the covariance and principal components analysis results indicate that stock market performance and share prices have direct relationship. The covariance results further showed that the relations so revealed are positive and significant. JEL: C32, F36, G15, E60 Article visualizations:
Resilience in systemic lupus erythematosus

Resilience (RS) concerns human beings’ capacity to respond positively to adverse situations they face, enabling individuals to achieve, maintain, or recover physical or emotional health after devastating illness, losses, or other stressful situations. RS can be an important factor in health promotion. The aim of this study was to evaluate RS in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Forty-five SLE patients participated in this study and were evaluated by both Mini International Neuropsychiatric and Wagnild and Young scales. Of these, 8.9% had low RS (score < 121), 71% medium score (between 121 and 146), and 20% high RS (score > 146). Patients over 35 years of age had the highest scores on the RS scale and patients at risk of committing suicide presented the lowest RS scores, possibly due to high level of depression. Identifying risk and protective factors is important for developing psychological support strategies.
Cell–cell adhesion and aggregation: Influence on the growth behavior of CHO cells

The influence of cell‐cell adhesion on the growth behavior of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells in suspension culture was investigated. CHO cells form aggregates under suboptimal growth conditions. Clusters are formed around decaying and dead cells. The deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) released from these cells was found to mediate the cells was found to mediate the cell‐cell adhesion. Cluster formation dramatically influenced the growth behavior of the cells. First, cells within aggregates showed a strongly reduced specific proliferation rate, and second, shear forces exerted on large aggregates caused a considerable higher specific death rate than those exerted on single cells. These factors led to a reduction of the specific growth rate up to 50%. This decrease could be avoided by addition of DNase 1 to the medium. It is shown that the separate determination of the specific proliferation and death rates is not feasible with state‐of‐the‐art methods. To achieve a more profound and precise description of the growth pattern of animal cells, we propose an extended Monod model and describe the relevant methods. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Stereo-based visual navigation of mobile robots in unknown environments

In this paper a stereo vision-based algorithm for mobile robots navigation and exploration in unknown outdoor environments is proposed. The algorithm is solely based on stereo images and implemented on a nonholonomic mobile robot. The first step for exploration in unknown environments is construction of the map of circumference in real-time. By getting disparity image from rectified stereo images and translating its data to 3D-space, point cloud model of environments is constructed. Then by projecting points to XZ plane and put local maps together based on visual odometry, global map of environment is constructed in real-time. A* algorithm is used for investigating optimal path and nonlinear back-stepping controller guides the robot to follow the identified path. Finally, the mobile robot explores for a desired object in an unknown environment through these steps. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in real-time implementations.
DO DEMOCRACIES SPEND LESS ON THE MILITARY? SPAIN AS A LONG-TERM CASE STUDY (1876-2009)*

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the influence of political regimes on the level and economic composition of military expenditure in Spain over the long run. In contrast with the widely accepted negative relation between democracy and military spending, the paper suggests that democratic governments established in the late 1970s and early 1980s after Franco’s dictatorship had a positive influence on the military burden owing to the efforts to reorient the army towards international threats and to involve the armed forces with the newly democratic institutions. In addition, the analysis of military expenditure allows us to conclude that the international orientation of democratic military policies took place along with financial efforts to obtain a capital-intensive army to confront international military threats. RESUMEN El artículo analiza la influencia de los regímenes políticos en el nivel y en la composición económica del gasto militar en España en el largo plazo. En contraste con la relación negativa entre democracia y gasto militar comúnmente aceptada por la literatura, el artículo sugiere que los gobiernos democráticos establecidos a finales de los 1970s y principios de los 1980s tuvieron una influencia positiva en la carga militar española debido a los esfuerzos para reorientar el ejército hacia las amenazas exteriores y para involucrar las fuerzas armadas con las nuevas instituciones democráticas. Adicionalmente, el análisis de la composición económica del gasto permite concluir que la orientación internacional de las políticas militares de los gobiernos democráticos fue aparejada con un mayor esfuerzo para conseguir un ejército intensivo en capital, con el objetivo de poder intervenir en el escenario militar internacional.
Changes in postprandial release patterns of gastrointestinal hormones in late pregnancy and the early postpartum period

Summary. Intestinal transit time increases and gastrointestinal incretin effect is reported to decrease in pregnancy. The release patterns of gastrointestinal hormones related to these functions were studied in eight women before and after ingestion of a standardized meal at 32–34 weeks gestation and at 4 days postpartum. Basal plasma motilin and the integrated meal response of motilin, pancreatic polypeptide (PP) and gastric inhibitory polypeptide (GIP) were significantly lower in pregnancy than postpartum. The meal‐induced rise of somatostatin and vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) was, however, absent in late pregnancy; whereas the somatostatin response recovered postpartum, and the plasma VIP concentrations stabilized at significantly higher levels postpartum without any meal response. Basal and meal‐induced plasma insulin were significantly higher in pregnancy.
Estimating the Efficacy of Wildfire Management Using Propensity Scores

BUTRY, DAVID THOMAS. Estimating the Efficacy of Wildfire Management Using Propensity Scores. (Under the direction of Dr. Walter N. Thurman and Dr. Marcia L. Gumpertz). This research examines the effect wildfire mitigation has on broad-scale wildfire behavior. Each year, hundreds of million of dollars are spent on fire suppression and fuels management applications, yet little is known, quantitatively, of the returns to these programs in terms of their impact on wildfire extent and intensity. This is especially true when considering that wildfire management influences and reacts to several, often times confounding factors, including socioeconomic characteristics, values at risk, heterogeneous landscapes, and climate. Due to the endogenous nature of suppression effort and fuels management intensity and placement with wildfire behavior, least-square models may prove inadequate. Instead, I examine the applicability of two-stage least squares, propensity score blocking, and a newly developed technique, control score blocking in modeling wildfire. This research makes several significant contributions including: (1) applying techniques developed in labor economics and in epidemiology to evaluate the effects of natural resource policies on landscapes, rather than on individuals; (2) a better understanding of the relationship between wildfire mitigation strategies and their influence on broad-scale wildfire patterns; (3) quantifying the returns to suppression and fuels management on wildfire behavior. ESTIMATING THE EFFICACY OF WILDFIRE MANAGEMENT USING PROPENSITY SCORES by DAVID THOMAS BUTRY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Gender, Ethnicity and Space: The Case of Racial Ethnic Minority Women Telecommuters in Omaha, NE

Telecommuting is a labor process in which employees work from home on a regular basis, but maintain contact with the office through telecommunications technology such as computer networks, facsimile machines, voice messaging systems, and so on. Telecommuting has become very popular in recent years; however, little is known about its social and spatial impacts. Preliminary research on gender and telecommuting has shown that telecommuting tends to reinforce a traditional division of domestic labor and identification of women with the home; however, whether this is the case for ethnic minority women is unknown. This thesis research used in-depth, semi­ structured interviews to investigate interactions among gender, race, ethnicity, telecommuting, and geography. Interviews with four racial and / or ethnic minority women in Omaha, Nebraska provided data for an examination of their lived experiences as telecommuters.
Effects of a calm companion on fear reactions in naive test horses.

REASON FOR PERFORMING STUDY In fear-eliciting situations, horses tend to show flight reactions that can be dangerous for both horse and man. Finding appropriate methods for reducing fearfulness in horses has important practical implications. OBJECTIVES To investigate whether the presence of a calm companion horse influences fear reactions in naive subject horses. HYPOTHESES The presence of a habituated (calm) companion horse in a fear-eliciting situation can reduce fear reactions in naive subject horses, compared to subject horses with a nonhabituated companion (control). METHODS Minimally handled (n = 36), 2-year-old stallions were used, 18 as subjects and 18 as companions. Companion horses (n = 9) were habituated to an otherwise frightening, standardised test stimulus (calm companions), whereas the rest (n = 9) of the companion horses remained nonhabituated (control companions). During the test, unique pairs of companion and subject horses were exposed to the test stimulus while heart rate and behavioural responses were registered. Subsequently, subject horses were exposed to the stimulus on their own (post test). RESULTS Subject horses, paired with a calm companion horse, showed less fear-related behaviour and lower heart rate responses compared to subject horses with control companions. Results from the post test suggest that the difference between treatment groups remained in the subsequent absence of companion horses. CONCLUSIONS AND POTENTIAL RELEVANCE It appears possible to reduce fear reactions in young, naive horses by allowing them to interact with a calm companion horse in fear-eliciting situations.
The involvement of ErbB4 with schizophrenia: Association and expression studies

Neuregulin 1 (NRG1) has been found to be associated with schizophrenia in several populations. Consistently, mutant mice heterozygous for either NRG1 or its receptor, ErbB4, show a behavioral phenotype that overlaps with mouse models for schizophrenia. These observations raised the hypothesis that impaired NRG1–ErbB4 signaling may contribute to schizophrenia susceptibility. Nineteen SNPs encompassing the ErbB4 gene were selected from the HapMap database and genotyped in genomic DNA isolated from 59 Ashkenazi schizophrenia patients and 130 matched controls. Expression analysis of ErbB4 splice variants was performed on postmortem DLPFC samples obtained from Caucasian patients and controls by real‐time PCR. We found a highly significant difference between patient and control groups in three SNPs from one linkage disequilibrium (LD) block both in allele (P = 0.013, 0.0045, 0.0049) and genotype frequencies (P = 0.00013, 0.000021, 0.00018), as well as a risk haplotype (P = 0.00044). Expression analysis indicated that the CYT‐1 isoform is overexpressed in patients (P = 0.047) and that juxtamembrane (JM)‐a displays a similar trend (P = 0.081). This study provides a direct link between ErbB4 and the disease. We propose that NRG1 and its receptor ErbB4 are components of a biological pathway, involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A minimum attention control law for ball catching

Digital implementations of control laws typically involve discretization with respect to both time and space, and a control law that can achieve a task at coarser levels of discretization can be said to require less control attention, and also reduced implementation costs. One means of quantitatively capturing the attention of a control law is to measure the rate of change of the control with respect to changes in state and time. In this paper we present an attention-minimizing control law for ball catching and other target tracking tasks based on Brockett’s attention criterion. We first highlight the connections between this attention criterion and some well-known principles from human motor control. Under the assumption that the optimal control law is the sum of a linear time-varying feedback term and a time-varying feedforward term, we derive an LQR-based minimum attention tracking control law that is stable, and obtained efficiently via a finite-dimensional optimization over the symmetric positive-definite matrices. Taking ball catching as our primary task, we perform numerical experiments comparing the performance of the various control strategies examined in the paper. Consistent with prevailing theories about human ball catching, our results exhibit several familiar features, e.g., the transition from open-loop to closed-loop control during the catching movement, and improved robustness to spatiotemporal discretization. The presented control laws are applicable to more general tracking problems that are subject to limited communication resources.
Aiding diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus with enhanced gait feature separability

Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH) is a neurological condition that challenges differential diagnosis, as the symptoms -- cognitive and gait impairment and urinary incontinence -- are similar to those of many aging disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. Since NPH is caused by abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) around the brain, a high volume lumbar puncture (HVLP) to remove excess fluid is used as the stimulus for a suspected NPH patient, and a diagnosis is made based on the observed cognitive and functional response. Gait features have long been used as functional indicators in the pre- and post-HVLP assessment. However, these assessments are limited to visual observation in the clinic. Therefore, only simple gait features such as walking speed (based on time to walk 10m) and average stride length/time (based on the number of steps to walk 10m) are used. However, these features provide limited separability in the NPH diagnosis. This paper presents methods for enhanced diagnostic separability using additional gait features extracted from an inertial body sensor network (BSN), including stride time variability, double support time, and stability. A pilot study on six HVLP patients -- four of whom were ultimately diagnosed with NPH -- revealed that gait stability assessed by Lyapunov exponent provides better separability and can enhance the differential diagnosis. In addition, these results suggest that additional testing can be performed continuously outside of the clinic to account for patients' variable HVLP response times.
MMIC technologies for MW and MMW applications

This paper covers two recent progresses on MW and MMW MMIC technologies. One is the high efficiency and high power density pHEMT technology for power amplifier MMICs. The nonlinear drain resistance is found to be the cause of large power loss at millimeter-wave, although it acts like the conventional resistor at low frequency. A new device structure is proposed to overcome this problem, and results in excellent performance of 0.65 W/mm output power and 35% PAE at Ka band. The other topic is the InGaP HBT oscillator enhancing the output power without any reduction of the phase noise. At 40 GHz, 6 dBm output power and -113 dBc/Hz phase noise has been demonstrated. The 2nd harmonic matching is the key to achieve high output power and low phase noise simultaneously. Results are supported by both simulations and measurements.
Axonal connections of the medial magnocellular nucleus of the anterior neostriatum in zebra finches

The medial magnocellular nucleus of the anterior neostriatum (mMAN) is a small cortical nucleus which was previously identified as a component of the neural circuitry controlling vocal behavior in songbirds based on its efferent connection to the High Vocal Center (HVC), a major song control nucleus (Nottebohm et al. [1982] J. Comp. Neurol. 207:344‐357; Bottjer et al. [1989] J. Comp. Neurol. 279:312‐326). We have conducted tract tracing experiments (using wheat‐germ agglutinin‐horseradish peroxidase (WGA‐HRP), the carbocyanine dye DiI, and biocytin) to determine the complete pattern of afferent and efferent connections of mMAN in adult male zebra finches. We confirmed the existence of an efferent projection from mMAN to HVC and discovered a novel projection to the region medial to caudal HVC called paraHVC (pHVC). Injections of retrograde tracers into mMAN showed that afferent input to mMAN originates from the dorsomedial nucleus of the posterior thalamus (DMP). Injections of DiI into DMP produced anterograde label over mMAN, thus confirming the DMP‐to‐mMAN projection. Interestingly, this anterograde label extended beyond the region of mMAN defined by HVC‐projecting neurons into the immediately surrounding cortex. This extended terminal field of DMP efferents indicates that mMAN encompasses a core population of projection neurons surrounded by a shell of non‐HVC‐projecting neurons, both of which receive input from the dorsal thalamus. Analysis of retrograde DiI label resulting from DMP injections revealed two major sources of afferent input to DMP originating in regions of the archistriatum and hypothalamus. Inputs to DMP were distributed throughout the dorsal archistriatum and included the area that receives a projection from the parvicellular shell region of the lateral magnocellular nucleus of the anterior neostriatum, a song control nucleus, as well as the dorsal portion of the robust nucleus of the archistriatum, the motor‐cortical output of the song control system. The projections from song control regions of the archistriatum to DMP may feed information back into telencephalic song control circuitry via the DMP ‐ mMAN ‐ HVC/pHVC pathway. The other source of afferent input to DMP is located in the external cellular stratum of the lateral hypothalamus (SCE). This newly delineated SCE ‐ DMP ‐ mMAN ‐ HVCIpHVC pathway is the first report of a hypothalamic brain region neuroanatomically integrated with song control circuitry. Because hypothalamic brain regions are important for homeostasis and regulating behavior, the trans‐synaptic circuitry of mMAN may help t o integrate information about the bird's internal state, such as sexual maturation, with song learning and production. J. Comp. Neurol. 382:364‐381, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Immunization with Recombinant V10 Protects Cynomolgus Macaques from Lethal Pneumonic Plague

ABSTRACT Vaccine and therapeutic strategies that prevent infections with Yersinia pestis have been sought for over a century. Immunization with live attenuated (nonpigmented) strains and immunization with subunit vaccines containing recombinant low-calcium-response V antigen (rLcrV) and recombinant F1 (rF1) antigens are considered effective in animal models. Current antiplague subunit vaccines in development for utilization in humans contain both antigens, either as equal concentrations of the two components (rF1 plus rLcrV) or as a fusion protein (rF1-rLcrV). Here, we show that immunization with either purified rLcrV (a protein at the tip of type III needles) or a variant of this protein, recombinant V10 (rV10) (lacking amino acid residues 271 to 300), alone or in combination with rF1, prevented pneumonic lesions and disease pathogenesis. In addition, passive immunization studies showed that specific antibodies of macaques immunized with rLcrV, rV10, or rF1, either alone or in combination, conferred protection against bubonic plague challenge in mice. Finally, we found that when we compared the reactivities of anti-rLcrV and anti-rV10 immune sera from cynomolgus macaques, BALB/c mice, and brown Norway rats with LcrV-derived peptides, rV10, but not rLcrV immune sera, lacked antibodies recognizing linear LcrV oligopeptides.