Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preparation of Metal–Polymer Composite Films by the Metal–Polymer Co-Electrodeposition Method

Co-epoxy composite films were synthesized by a newly developed electrochemical method, which may be termed a "metal-polymer co-electrodeposition method", i.e., the simultaneous deposition of Co and epoxy resin from a reaction solution containing Co(CH3COO), glycine and water-soluble epoxy resin. Glycine acts as the complexing agent for Co2+. Using the FTIR and XPS, it emerged that the deposited films contained Co and epoxy. The composite films deposited from a Co2+ ion concentration higher than 35 mM in the reaction solution have low electrical resistance. Hep Co peaks were observed on the XRD pattern of these films. On the other hand, the composite films deposited from a Co2+ ion concentration lower than 30 mM have high resistance and no Co hep peaks were observed. These results suggest that the microstructure of the Co-epoxy films changed at a Co concentration of around 30 mM.
Proteolytic processing in the biogenesis of the neurosecretory egg-laying hormone in Aplysia. 2. Analysis of tryptic fragments.

Pulse-chase studies indicate that the peptide egg-laying hormone, ELH, of the neurosecretory bag cells of the mollusk Aplysia is generated by a complex multistep proteolytic processing sequence. Such data indicate that ELH and another secretory peptide, AP (acidic peptide), are generated from a 29,000-dalton precursor via a common intermediate and that this precursor also gives rise to an additional 13,000-14,500-dalton product. In the present study, we have adapted the procedure of Elder et al. [Elder, J. H. , Pickett, R. A. , Hampton, J., & Lerner, R. A. (1977) J. Biol. Chem. 252, 6510-6515] to obtain tryptic fragments of biosynthetically labeled bag cell proteins. Analyses of these fragments by isoelectric focusing and thin-layer chromatography/electrophoresis are consistent with the processing sequence inferred from pulse-chase data. Furthermore, the peptide maps have revealed the presence of an additional copy of the AP peptide within the 13,000-14,500-dalton product.
Electrical characterization of solid state ionic memory elements

–Solid state ionic devices composed of metal doped glasses are among the promising new non-volatile memory technologies. The memory effect is based on polarity-dependent switching at small bias and current due to the electrodeposition of metal in the glassy electrolyte. Low voltage operation, high OFF/ON-ratios, and considerable scaling potential make this technology interesting for memory applications. In this paper, we present the results of extensive electrical characterizations from test-chips jointly processed and characterized at Arizona State University and at Infineon Technologies. The chips incorporate variations in feature size from the micrometer scale down to a hundred nanometers. The measurements address important topics for memory applications such as speed, retention, and endurance. We discuss the benefits as well as the challenges of this technology from its current stage of development.
Transplantation of Cryopreserved Human Embryonal Carcinoma-Derived Neurons (NT2N Cells) Promotes Functional Recovery in Ischemic Rats

This study was designed to explore the efficacy of a human clone cell line as an alternative neural graft source and to validate the practice of cryopreservation and xenografting as logistical approaches toward conducting neural transplantation. We investigated the biological effects of transplanting cultured human neurons (NT2N cells) derived from a well-characterized embryonal carcinoma cell line into the brains of rats subjected to transient, focal cerebral ischemia induced by embolic occlusion of the middle cerebral artery. At 1 month and extending throughout the 6-month posttransplantation test period, ischemic animals that were transplanted with NT2N cells and treated with an immunosuppressive drug displayed a significant improvement in a passive avoidance task as well as a normalization of asymmetrical motor behavior compared to ischemic animals that received rat fetal cerebellar cell grafts or vehicle alone. Remarkably, cryopreserved NT2N cell grafts compared with fresh NT2N cell grafts, remained viable in the immunosuppressed rat brain and effective in producing behavioral recovery in immunosuppressed ischemic animals. The long-term viability of cryopreserved NT2N cell xenografts in vivo and their sustained effectiveness in promoting behavioral recovery suggest potential utilization of xenografting and cryopreservation as useful protocols for establishing clone cell lines as graft source in neural transplantation therapies for central nervous system disorders.
The Disposition of the Cervical Spine and Deformation of Available Cord Space with Conventional- and Balloon Laryngoscopy-Guided Laryngeal Intubation: A Comparative Study

Orotracheal intubation causes cervical spine (C-spine) extension and potential (hypothetical) space available for the cord (SAC)-deformation. In the present study, we determined and compared the changes induced by conventional- and balloon laryngoscopy-guided orolaryngeal intubation in the upper C-spine’s osseous unit-orientation, segmental angulation, segmental SAC-sagittal surface areas (SSAs), segmental/total posterior SAC-aspect, and segmental SAC-width. Eight healthy volunteers were enrolled. A set of neutral head position (baseline)- and two sets of intubation-lateral C-spine radiographs were obtained. Relative to baseline, both intubation techniques induced significant changes in the occiput (OCC)-, third cervical vertebra (C3)-, C4-, and C5-orientation, the OCC-C1-segmental angulation, all the segmental SAC-SSAs, and the OCC-C1-, and C1-2-posterior SAC-aspect (P < 0.05 to < 0.001); conventional intubation caused additional significant changes in C2-orientation, total (OCC through C5)-posterior SAC-aspect, and OCC-C1-SAC-width (P < 0.05 to < 0.001). Relative to conventional intubation, balloon-assisted intubation caused less change in C3-orientation and C2-3-SAC-width (P < 0.05), and less reduction in OCC-C1-, C1-2-, and C4-5-SAC-SSAs (P < 0.05 to < 0.01). Orotracheal intubation should be cautiously performed in patients with space-occupying upper-C-spine-SAC lesions, even if there is no concomitant osseous/ligamentous pathology. In such cases, balloon laryngoscopy may be chosen over the conventional technique, because it causes less SAC deformation.
Not Enough Fruit and Vegetables or Too Many Cookies, Candies, Salty Snacks, and Soft Drinks?

Objectives. There are many contributors to obesity, including excess consumption of “discretionary calories” (foods high in sugar and fat and low in essential nutrients), lack of fruit/vegetable consumption, and insufficient physical activity. This study contrasted physical activity, fruit/vegetable consumption, and discretionary calorie consumption from selected foods relative to the 2005 dietary guidelines. Methods. We conducted a cross-sectional survey in 228 urban census tracts in Los Angeles County (LAC) and Southern Louisiana (SL) and estimated calories in the past 24 hours from fruit, vegetables, cookies, candy, salty snacks, sweetened soda, and alcohol among 2,767 participants. Results. The population-weighted mean daily intake of calories from candy, cookies, salty snacks, soda, and alcohol was 438 in LAC and 617 in SL. Alcohol comprised a small portion of the calories consumed. Reported discretionary calorie consumption from a small set of items exceeded guidelines by more than 60% in LAC and 120% in SL. In contrast, the mean consumption of fruit and vegetables fell 10% short in LAC and 20% in SL. There was significant heterogeneity in consumption of cookies, candy, salty snacks, and soda across income, gender, and race. Conclusions. The overconsumption of discretionary calories was much greater than the underconsumption of fruit and vegetables. This finding suggests that unless the excessive consumption of salty snacks, cookies, candy, and sugar-sweetened beverages is curtailed, other interventions focusing on increasing physical activity and fruit and vegetable consumption will have a limited impact on obesity control. It may be politically more expedient to promote an increase in consumption of healthy items rather than a decrease in consumption of unhealthy items, but it may be far less effective.
Power Grip and Precision Handling

The recent study by Napier (1956) of the prehensile movements of the human hand is of outstanding importance because it points out that the "nature of the intended activity finally influences the pattern of the grip" (p. 906). He distinguishes between the "precision grip" and the "power grip" and states that these patterns, "either separately or in combination, provide the anatomical basis for all prehensile activities, whether skilled or unskilled" (p. 902). In the precision grip the thumb is abducted in both the metacarpophalangeal and the carpo-metacarpal joints, whereas in the power grip both joints are addicted. With the abduction (combined with flexion) the thumb also rotates medially, so that the pulp surface becomes directly "opposed to the pulp surface of one or all of the remaining digits for the purposes of (precision) prehension" (p. 908).
Unsupervised Model Selection for Variational Disentangled Representation Learning

Disentangled representations have recently been shown to improve fairness, data efficiency and generalisation in simple supervised and reinforcement learning tasks. To extend the benefits of disentangled representations to more complex domains and practical applications, it is important to enable hyperparameter tuning and model selection of existing unsupervised approaches without requiring access to ground truth attribute labels, which are not available for most datasets. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a simple yet robust and reliable method for unsupervised disentangled model selection. Our approach, Unsupervised Disentanglement Ranking (UDR), leverages the recent theoretical results that explain why variational autoencoders disentangle (Rolinek et al, 2019), to quantify the quality of disentanglement by performing pairwise comparisons between trained model representations. We show that our approach performs comparably to the existing supervised alternatives across 5,400 models from six state of the art unsupervised disentangled representation learning model classes. Furthermore, we show that the ranking produced by our approach correlates well with the final task performance on two different domains.
Extra-gradient with player sampling for provable fast convergence in n-player games

Data-driven model training is increasingly relying on finding Nash equilibria with provable techniques, e.g., for GANs and multi-agent RL. In this paper, we analyse a new extra-gradient method, that performs gradient extrapolations and updates on a random subset of players at each iteration. This approach provably exhibits the same rate of convergence as full extra-gradient in non-smooth convex games. We propose an additional variance reduction mechanism for this to hold for smooth convex games. Our approach makes extrapolation amenable to massive multiplayer settings, and brings empirical speed-ups, in particular when using cyclic sampling schemes. We demonstrate the efficiency of player sampling on large-scale non-smooth and non-strictly convex games. We show that the joint use of extrapolation and player sampling allows to train better GANs on CIFAR10.
Review: dual benefits, compositions, recommended storage, and intake duration of mother's milk

Breastfeeding benefits both infants and mothers. Nutrients in mother's milk help protect infants from multiple diseases including infections, cancers, diabetes, gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases. We performed literature mining on 31,496 mother's-milk-related abstracts from PubMed and the results suggest the need for individualized mother's milk fortification and proper maternal supplementations (e.g. probiotics, vitamin D), because mother's milk compositions (e.g. fatty acids) vary according to maternal diet and responses to infection in mothers and/or infants. We review at details the variability observed in mother's milk compositions and its possible health effects in infants. We also review the effects of storage practices on mother's milk nutrients, recommended durations for mother's milk intake and the associated health benefits.
HEARING CONSERVATION AMONG CLASSICAL MUSICIANS; NEEDS, MEANS AND ATTITUDES

Noise is usually defined either unwanted sound or sound that is harmful to the hearing. Earlier studies have shown that musicians are exposed to sound levels that can be harmful to hearing, and thus music can be considered as noise. Studies have also shown that musicians have hearing problems due to prolonged music exposure. This is also the case among classical musicians. According to the new noise directive, hearing conservation programs directed to entertainment sector are needed. However the needs and attitudes of the classical music players are not understood in many perspectives. In this study, the total annual noise exposure including personal rehearsals has been measured and evaluated for the first time. The problems experienced with hearing protective devices, hearing symptoms (self-evaluated hearing loss, tinnitus, hyperacusis and diplacusis), and stress and their interaction were identified and quantified in two countries among large symphony orchestras. The results showed that the use of a hearing protective device was poor, especially in personal rehearsals. The musicians with hearing loss used more often a hearing protective device. All hearing symptoms were related to stress and reduced work satisfaction. Hearing loss was measured with audiometer among a volunteer group. The hearing loss correlated with music exposure but was smaller than predicted by the standard ISO 1999-1990. Room acoustics was improved in a project involving small classrooms for music students. The classrooms correspond to personal rehearsal facilities for musicians. The improvement in room acoustics was minor, but had a beneficial effect on job satisfaction. The thesis provides means to implement personal protection, technical means and training in hearing conservation programs for classical music players.
Control limit on quantum state preparation under decoherence

Quantum information technologies require careful control for generating and preserving a desired target quantum state. The biggest practical obstacle is, of course, decoherence. Therefore, the reachability analysis, which in our scenario aims to estimate the distance between the controlled state under decoherence and the target state, is of great importance to evaluate the realistic performance of those technologies. This paper presents a lower bound of the fidelity-based distance for a general open Markovian quantum system driven by the decoherence process and several types of control including feedback. The lower bound is straightforward to calculate and can be used as a guide for choosing the target state, as demonstrated in some examples. Moreover, the lower bound is applied to derive a theoretical limit in some quantum metrology problems based on a large-size atomic ensemble under control and decoherence.
Hierarchical Feature Aggregation Networks for Video Action Recognition

Most action recognition methods base on a) a late aggregation of frame level CNN features using average pooling, max pooling, or RNN, among others, or b) spatio-temporal aggregation via 3D convolutions. The first assume independence among frame features up to a certain level of abstraction and then perform higher-level aggregation, while the second extracts spatio-temporal features from grouped frames as early fusion. In this paper we explore the space in between these two, by letting adjacent feature branches interact as they develop into the higher level representation. The interaction happens between feature differencing and averaging at each level of the hierarchy, and it has convolutional structure that learns to select the appropriate mode locally in contrast to previous works that impose one of the modes globally (e.g. feature differencing) as a design choice. We further constrain this interaction to be conservative, e.g. a local feature subtraction in one branch is compensated by the addition on another, such that the total feature flow is preserved. We evaluate the performance of our proposal on a number of existing models, i.e. TSN, TRN and ECO, to show its flexibility and effectiveness in improving action recognition performance.
SEMA: an Extended Semantic Evaluation Metric for AMR

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a recently designed semantic representation language intended to capture the meaning of a sentence, which may be represented as a single-rooted directed acyclic graph with labeled nodes and edges. The automatic evaluation of this structure plays an important role in the development of better systems, as well as for semantic annotation. Despite there is one available metric, smatch, it has some drawbacks. For instance, smatch creates a self-relation on the root of the graph, has weights for different error types, and does not take into account the dependence of the elements in the AMR structure. With these drawbacks, smatch masks several problems of the AMR parsers and distorts the evaluation of the AMRs. In view of this, in this paper, we introduce an extended metric to evaluate AMR parsers, which deals with the drawbacks of the smatch metric. Finally, we compare both metrics, using four well-known AMR parsers, and we argue that our metric is more refined, robust, fairer, and faster than smatch.
Species-Level Paraphyly and Polyphyly: Frequency, Causes, and Consequences, with Insights from Animal Mitochondrial DNA

▪ Abstract Many uses of gene trees implicitly assume that nominal species are monophyletic in their alleles at the study locus. However, in well-sampled gene trees, certain alleles in one species may appear more closely related to alleles from different species than to other conspecific alleles. Such deviations from species-level monophyly have a variety of causes and may lead to erroneous evolutionary interpretations if undetected. The present paper describes the causes and consequences of these paraphyletic and polyphyletic patterns. It also provides a detailed literature survey of mitochondrial DNA studies on low-level animal phylogeny and phylogeography, results from which reveal the frequency of nonmonophyly and patterns of interpretation and sampling. This survey detected species-level paraphyly or polyphyly in 23% of 2319 assayed species, demonstrating this phenomenon to be statistically supported, taxonomically widespread, and far more common than generally recognized. Our findings call for increa.
Strategic Prediction with Latent Aggregative Games

We introduce a new class of context dependent, incomplete information games to serve as structured prediction models for settings with significant strategic interactions. Our games map the input context to outcomes by first condensing the input into private player types that specify the utilities, weighted interactions, as well as the initial strategies for the players. The game is played over multiple rounds where players respond to weighted aggregates of their neighbors' strategies. The predicted output from the model is a mixed strategy profile (a near-Nash equilibrium) and each observation is thought of as a sample from this strategy profile. We introduce two new aggregator paradigms with provably convergent game dynamics, and characterize the conditions under which our games are identifiable from data. Our games can be parameterized in a transferable manner so that the sets of players can change from one game to another. We demonstrate empirically that our games as models can recover meaningful strategic interactions from real voting data.
Experimental investigations on the nonequilibrium dynamics of pattern formation in fluid and granular systems

Patterns are quotidian in nature. Distinct multiscale patterns are generally a consequence of nonequilibrium dynamical processes associated with mechanical or hydrodynamic instabilities. In this thesis, I report experimental investigations on pattern formation in a few examples of fluid and granular systems, and uncover the underlying mechanisms that give rise to those patterns. Leidenfrost drops are known to experience star-shaped oscillations with little damping. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Here I report that the hydrodynamic coupling between the rapid evaporated vapor flow and vapor-liquid interface excites the star-shaped oscillations, suggesting a purely hydrodynamic origin. Polygonal desiccation crack patterns are commonly observed in natural systems. However, it is unclear whether similar crack patterns spanning multiple length scales share the same underlying physics. I report experimental results on polygonal cracks in drying suspensions of micron-sized particles. In cornstarch-water mixtures, multi-scale crack patterns were observed due to two distinct desiccation mechanisms. We also find the characteristic area of the polygonal cracks, and film thickness obey a universal power law. Finally, I report sedimentations of non-Brownian particles in viscous fluids. We observed an effective repulsion between particles with nonuniform density in both two-body and many-body systems in two and three dimensions, in contrast to particles with uniform density. We also characterize the statistical properties of the sedimentation patterns of particles in three dimensions. The patterns I report in this thesis represent typical examples in fluid and granular systems that are driven by nonequilibrium dynamics, and the underlying mechanisms we uncover are expected to enhance our understanding of how these seemingly simple patterns arise in natural systems.
Weakly-paired Cross-Modal Hashing

Hashing has been widely adopted for large-scale data retrieval in many domains, due to its low storage cost and high retrieval speed. Existing cross-modal hashing methods optimistically assume that the correspondence between training samples across modalities are readily available. This assumption is unrealistic in practical applications. In addition, these methods generally require the same number of samples across different modalities, which restricts their flexibility. We propose a flexible cross-modal hashing approach (Flex-CMH) to learn effective hashing codes from weakly-paired data, whose correspondence across modalities are partially (or even totally) unknown. FlexCMH first introduces a clustering-based matching strategy to explore the local structure of each cluster, and thus to find the potential correspondence between clusters (and samples therein) across modalities. To reduce the impact of an incomplete correspondence, it jointly optimizes in a unified objective function the potential correspondence, the cross-modal hashing functions derived from the correspondence, and a hashing quantitative loss. An alternative optimization technique is also proposed to coordinate the correspondence and hash functions, and to reinforce the reciprocal effects of the two objectives. Experiments on publicly multi-modal datasets show that FlexCMH achieves significantly better results than state-of-the-art methods, and it indeed offers a high degree of flexibility for practical cross-modal hashing tasks.