Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Membrane-Bound Phosphatases in Escherichia coli: Sequence of the pgpB Gene and Dual Subcellular Localization of the pgpB Product

The phosphatidyl glycerophosphate B phosphatase of Escherichia coli has a multiple substrate specificity and a peculiar dual subcellular localization in the envelope. Its phosphatidyl glycerophosphate phosphatase activity is higher in the cytoplasmic membrane, while phosphatidic acid and lysophosphatidic acid phosphatase activities are higher in the outer membrane. The DNA sequencing of the pgpB gene revealed a protein of 251 amino acids which had at least five hydrophobic membrane-spanning regions. About 37 hydrophilic residues in the middle of the sequence had considerable homology with the C-terminal conserved region of the ras family genes in eucaryotes. A protein of 28,000 daltons was expressed from the pgpB gene under a tac promoter in a runaway replication plasmid. This overproduced protein also revealed the dual subcellular localization.
Thermal Resistance and Gene Expression of Both Desiccation-Adapted and Rehydrated 2 Salmonella in Aged

7 The objective of this study was to investigate the thermal resistance and gene expression of both 8 desiccation-adapted and rehydrated Salmonella enterica Typhimurium in aged broiler litter. S. 9 Typhimurium was desiccation-adapted in aged broiler litter with 20% moisture content (a w : 0.81) 10 for 1, 2, 3, 12, or 24 h at room temperature and then rehydrated for 3 h. As analyzed by qRT- 11 PCR, rpoS , proV , dnaK , and grpE genes were up-regulated (P<0.05) under desiccation stress and 12 could be induced after 1 h but less than 2 h. Following rehydration, fold changes of these four 13 genes became significantly lower (P<0.05). Desiccation-adapted Δ rpoS mutant was less heat- 14 resistant at 75°C than desiccation-adapted wild type (P<0.05), whereas there were no differences 15 in heat resistance between desiccation-adapted mutants in two non-regulated genes ( otsA and 16 PagfD ) and desiccation-adapted wild type (P>0.05). Survival characteristics of desiccation- 17 adapted Δ PagfD (rdar morphotype) and Δ agfD (saw morphotype) mutants were similar (P>0.05). 18 The trehalose synthesis in desiccation-adapted wild type was not induced as compared to non- 19 adapted control (P>0.05). Our results demonstrated the importance of rpoS , proV , dnaK , and 20 grpE genes in the desiccation survival of S. Typhimurium. By using a Δ rpoS mutant, we found 21 that rpoS gene was involved in the cross-protection of desiccation-adapted S. Typhimurium 22 against high temperature, while trehalose synthesis or rdar morphology did not play a significant 23 role in this phenomenon. In summary, S. Typhimurium could respond rapidly to the low-a w 24 condition in aged broiler litter while developing the cross-protection against high temperature, but this process could be reversed upon rehydration.
Variation in the Myotis keaysi complex (Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae), with description of a new species from Ecuador

The genus Myotis comprises a diverse group of vespertilionid bats with worldwide distribution. Twenty-eight Neotropical species are currently recognized. In this study, we evaluate molecular and morphological variation in the M. keaysi complex, a high elevation clade of Neotropical myotine bats characterized by complex taxonomy and high morphological variation. A phylogeny inferred with cytochrome-b sequences recovered two clades composed of samples traditionally assigned to M. keaysi, with 9% of genetic divergence between them. These clades were also suggested as putative distinct species by molecular species delimitation methods. Qualitative and quantitative morphological analyses indicated a phenotypic discontinuity between specimens from central Andes (including the holotype of M. keaysi) and western lowlands of Ecuador, showing strong congruence between molecular and morphological approaches. We therefore describe a new species for the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena region, documenting their external and cranial diagnostic characters by comparing them with other Neotropical species. In addition, we provide an emended diagnosis for our new concept of M. keaysi. El género Myotis comprende un grupo diverso de murciélagos vespertiliónidos de distribución mundial. Actualmente se reconocen veintiocho especies neotropicales. En este estudio evaluamos la variación molecular y morfológica del complejo M. keaysi, un clado de alta elevación topográfica? de murciélagos neotropicales caracterizados por una taxonomía compleja y una alta variación morfológica. La filogenia inferida a partir de secuencias de citocromo-b recuperó dos clados en base a muestras tradicionalmente asignadas a M. keaysi, con un 9% de divergencia genética entre sí. Ambos clados también se sugieren como especies putativas distintas mediante métodos de delimitación de especies moleculares. Los análisis morfológicos cualitativos y cuantitativos indicaron una discontinuidad fenotípica entre especímenes de los Andes centrales (incluido el holotipo de M. keaysi) y las tierras bajas occidentales de Ecuador, mostrando una marcada congruencia entre perspectivas moleculares y morfológicas. Por lo tanto, describimos una nueva especie para la región Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena, documentando caracteres diagnósticos externos y craneales por medio de comparaciones con otras especies neotropicales. Además, proporcionamos un diagnóstico modificado para el nuevo concepto de M. keaysi que proponemos
Making Sense of the New PhD Student Experience: Adapting to the First Year of Doctoral Studies Program

program during a pandemic. Now that you are either a new faculty member, an incipient faculty member, or an old-guard faculty member, I hope you will be able to better appreciate the lot of so many doctoral students, as you enact the myriad paradoxes that modern doctoral students are forced to confront and reconcile. I wish you good luck in that little enterprise. But, if you want to hear from a person living with such paradoxes, read Gaby ’ s forthright essay.
Impacts of Water and Energy Sector Reforms in Gujarat: The Case of Expansion of Micro Irrigation Schemes and Rationalisation of Agricultural Power Tariff

Against the backdrop of the water and energy sector reforms enunciated by the state government in Gujarat, this paper reviews the important policy changes and outcomes of farm-level adoption of water-saving technologies, on the one hand, and the effective implementation of energy tariff policies, on the other hand. Following an assessment of the water and energy policy and regulatory interventions, the paper provides an overview of the farm-level adoption micro irrigation (sprinkler and drip irrigation) systems over the past one decade of the policy reforms. The paper then examines the case of energy sector reforms enunciated by the state in coordination with the energy regulator through establishment of the distribution companies (DISCOMs). The paper brings out that the policy and regulatory interventions in the water and energy (power) sectors have been successful in terms of wider promotion of micro irrigation systems and deregulation of power generation and distribution activities by establishing dedicated DISCOMs. Thus, the policy initiatives were able to address several challenges facing the water and energy sectors in the state. Firstly, the wide-scale promotion of micro irrigation schemes has significantly reduced the groundwater over-extraction for agriculture. Second, the energy sector reforms have shown a significant progress towards rationalisation of tariffs across sectors. However, it emerges that the policy and regulatory reforms need to (i) go beyond the narrow confines of promotion of micro irrigation systems towards sustainable management of water resources and (ii) move beyond rationalisation of power tariffs by offering sustainable solutions to the problems of water and energy security amidst increasing competition for inter-sectoral allocations. Essentially, the energy sector policies and reforms may explore the potential of renewable energy sources through decentralised investments in solar and wind energy systems in the rural areas involving different public–private community partnership models.
Portfolio Design of a Demand Response Aggregator With Satisficing Consumers

This paper studies the impact of consumer behavior on the portfolio design of a demand response (DR) aggregator. Consumer behavior is modeled using elements of satisficing theory. We develop an optimization model to decide the optimal portfolio of DR contracts for an aggregator participating in the electricity market. In our model, the aggregator must pay a premium to enable the participation of consumers who have a certain aspiration threshold, below which they will not participate. Thus, the proposed model determines the premiums to be offered to consumers in order to obtain a DR portfolio that maximizes the aggregator’s operating surplus while satisfying the aspirations of participating consumers. Several simulations are performed to obtain insights on the value of the DR resource, and the importance of parameters used to model the consumer behavior.
Heparin Resistance During Cardiopulmonary Bypass in Adult Cardiac Surgery

The use of heparin for anticoagulation has changed the face of cardiac surgery by allowing a bloodless and motionless surgical field through the introduction of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). However, heparin is a drug with complex pharmacological properties which can cause significant interpatient differences in terms of responsiveness. Heparin resistance during CPB is a weighty issue due to the catastrophic consequences stemming from inadequate anticoagulation and the treatment of it necessitates a rationalized stepwise approach due to the multifactorial contributions towards this entity. The widespread utilization of activated clotting time (ACT) as a measurement of anticoagulation during CPB will also be examined as it may be a false indicator of heparin resistance. Heparin resistance has also been repeatedly reported in patients with COVID-19 infections which deserves further exploration in this pandemic era. This review aims to examine the variability in heparin potency, underlying mechanisms, limitations of using ACT for monitoring and provides a framework towards the current management of heparin resistance.
Chipnet: Enabling Large-scale Backscatter Network with Processor-free Devices

Differing from tremendous existing works that mainly focus on optimizing backscatter communication, Radio-to-Bus (R2B) communication utilizes backscatter to offload processors from IoT devices to the gateway, achieving processor-free devices of significantly reduced power and hardware cost. However, R2B communication is not suitable for large-scale backscatter networks, since R2B cannot support parallel and long-range communication between the gateway and hundreds of R2B devices. In this article, we present Chipnet, a network that supports hundreds of long-range and concurrent connections between the gateway and multiple processor-free devices. The high-level design of Chipnet includes a parallel frequency-division uplink mechanism that can work on processor-free devices and a processor-free MAC layer protocol that supports gateway to broadcast downlink data and individually manage each processor-free device. This design addresses practical issues facing the processor-free device architecture, such as synchronizing hundreds of processor-free devices, assigning unique channel frequencies to every device, and realizing power-efficient processor-free signal conversion. The results demonstrate that a Chipnet network can achieve a task throughput of 2,400 tasks/s with a latency of 72.23 ms. Compared with the R2B network, Chipnet achieves 3×–5× improvements in network coverage range and two orders of magnitude improvement in both network throughput and network latency.
Streaming 3D Content

point clouds, volumetric data. The process of delivering these assets from an hard-disk to a remote screen is subjected to a set of physical and logistical constraints: storage, bandwidth, latency, memory, computational power. A set of techniques can be used to work around these constraints or to trade one resource for another, in these talk we will try to paint a general picture of this framework and recall some of the main developments in technology and algorithms that let to the present situation.
Fair I/O scheduler for alleviating read/write interference by forced unit access in flash memory

For the past few years, the enterprise Solid State Drives that employ NVM Express are widely used due to their high performance. It is common for multiple tenants and processes to share a single SSD. Providing fair SSD performance for multiple applications has become an important issue. We observe that the write request with FUA flag delays the processing of read request due to SSD internal read/write interference. To alleviate the performance degradation of the read requests, we propose TABS, per-Type fAir Bandwidth I/O Scheduler for NVMe SSDs. TABS determines the fair bandwidth proportional to the maximum bandwidth and I/O issue rate for each type of request. (i) Two-phase Dynamic Scheduling sets fairness goals dynamically according to the I/O patterns of workload. Then, it throttles the FUA write requests to meet the pre-measured fairness goal. (ii) Software-based feedback makes more accurate scheduling possible. By using these techniques, TABS can guarantee fairness between the read and FUA flagged write requests. Finally, compared with the fairness goals, TABS achieves 76% fairness on average and up to 99.5% fairness, while the noop scheduler, the default Linux scheduler, shows 18% fairness.
An Efficient Topology for Wireless Power Transfer over a Wide Range of Loading Conditions

Although an inductive power transfer (IPT) system can transfer power efficiently in full-load conditions, its efficiency obviously decreases in light-load conditions. To solve this problem, based on a two-coil IPT system with a series-series compensation topology, a single-ended primary-inductor converter is introduced at the secondary side. By adjusting the set effective value of the current in the primary coil, the converter input voltage changes to maintain the equivalent input resistance of the converter in an optimal condition. The system can then transfer the power efficiently with the wide load conditions. Moreover, the system operates at a constant resonance frequency with a high power factor. Both the simulation and experimentation of a prototype with a 10 W IPT system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed topology for wireless power transfer.
Monte Carlo simulation of leakage currents in TiN/ZrO2/TiN capacitors

Leakage currents in TiN/high-κ-ZrO2/TiN capacitors were simulated by using a novel kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm specially designed to describe tunneling transport of charge carriers in high-κ dielectrics, including defect-assisted transport mechanisms. Comparing simulation results with experimental data, a model for electronic transport was established and validated. Transport was found to be dominated by Poole-Frenkel emission from positively charged bulk trap states at medium voltages and trap-assisted tunneling at high voltages. Information on the conduction band offset at the TiN/ZrO2 interface as well as on the trap depth was extracted. The model accurately describes the scaling of the leakage current with temperature and with thickness of the dielectric film, and it provides insight into the mutual interdependence of the competing transport mechanisms.
Understanding configuration dependencies of file systems

File systems have many configuration parameters. Such flexibility comes at the price of additional complexity which could lead to subtle configuration-related issues. To address the challenge, we study the potential configuration dependencies of a representative file system (i.e., Ext4), and identify a prevalent pattern called multi-level configuration dependencies. We build a static analyzer to extract the dependencies and leverage the information to address different configuration issues. Our preliminary prototype is able to extract 64 multi-level dependencies with a low false positive rate. Additionally, we can identify multiple configuration issues effectively.
HyCSim: A rapid design space exploration tool for emerging hybrid last-level caches

Recent years have seen a rising trend in the exploration of nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies in the memory subsystem. Particularly in the cache hierarchy, hybrid last-level cache (LLC) solutions are proposed to meet the wide-ranging performance and energy requirements of modern days applications. These emerging hybrid solutions need simulation and detailed exploration to fully understand their capabilities before exploiting them. Existing simulation tools are either too slow or incapable of prototyping such systems and optimizing for NVM devices. To this end, we propose HyCSim1, a trace-driven simulation infrastructure that enables rapid comparison of various hybrid LLC configurations for different optimization objectives. Notably, HyCSim makes it possible to quickly estimate the impact of various hybrid LLC insertion and replacement policies, disabling of a cache region at byte or cache frame granularity for different fault maps. In addition, HyCSim allows to evaluate the impact of various compression schemes on the overall performance (hit and miss rate) and the number of writes to the LLC. Our evaluation on ten multi-program workloads from the SPEC 2006 benchmarks suite shows that HyCSim accelerates the simulation time by 24 ×, compared to the cycle-accurate Gem5 simulator, with high-fidelity.
Unsupervised Contrastive Masking for Visual Haze Classification

Haze classification has gained much attention recently as a cost-effective solution for air quality monitoring. Different from conventional image classification tasks, it requires the classifier to capture the haze patterns of different severity degrees. Existing efforts typically focus on the extraction of effective haze features, such as the dark channel and deep features. However, it is observed that the light-haze images are often mis-classified due to the presence of diverse background scenes. To address this issue, this paper presents an unsupervised contrastive masking (UCM) algorithm to segment the haze regions without any supervision, and develops a dual-channel model-agnostic framework, termed magnifier neural network (MagNet), to effectively use the segmented haze regions to enhance the learning of haze features by conventional deep learning models. Specifically, MagNet employs the haze regions to provide the pixel- and feature-level visual information via three strategies, including Input Augmentation, Network Constraint, and Feature Enhancement, which work as a soft-attention regularizer to alleviates the trade-off between capturing the global scene information and the local information in the haze regions. Experiments were conducted on two datasets in terms of performance comparison, parameter estimation, ablation studies, and case studies, and the results verified that UCM can accurately and rapidly segment the haze regions, and the proposed three strategies of MagNet consistently improve the performance of the state-of-the-art deep learning backbones.
Patent Validity—Extent, Drivers and Management Implications of Patent Invalidation

Patents that later turn out to be invalid hinder innovation by third parties unduly, and fail to provide certainty to the patentee. Motivated by the high revocation rates of challenged patents, this dissertation asks: what would be the odds of a randomly picked patent being invalidated? Based on German court decisions, expert interviews, and a survey among patent lawyers an average probability of (partial or full) invalidation of at least 80% is predicted. A possible solution is a significant increase of the inventive step required for grant combined with an unchanged inventive-step standard in revocation suits.
Institutions and Foreign Direct Investment: What Role for Investment Policy in Southeast Europe?

Abstract Institutions are generally perceived as an important determinant of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Which institutions matter and why for FDI, remains however one of prominent questions in public policy debate amid complexities related to different institutional dimensions, and incomplete or even vague understanding of underlying mechanism(s) at work. In this paper we account for these ambiguities, and focus on institutions that reveal government efforts to design proper institutional and policy framework to attract FDI, as opposed to considering institutions in broader sense. Specifically, we contribute to FDI policy debate by analysing the impact of institutions measuring Investment policy and promotion on inward FDI flows in South East Europe (SEE). To this end we use a unique dataset that is comprised of specific, FDI related institutional indicators developed and published by the OECD. The results of this empirical investigation deeper our understanding on whether differences in FDI policies and institutional set-up across South East European (SEE) countries explain variations in inward FDI flows relaying on bilateral FDI flows and the gravity modelling technique. We bring novel evidence that investment policy efforts seemingly do pay off, highlighting the importance of progress and reforms embodied not only in FDI regulation, but also in FDI policy variables including FDI Promotion and Facilitation, Transparency, Privatisation policy and Public Private Partnership in attracting FDI in SEE. The analysed institutional effect properly accounts for the possible time-variant and context-dependant effect of institutions. The suggested importance of FDI policy variables seem valuable in terms of general FDI policy issues and trade-offs.
Shipborne GNSS acquisition of sea surface heights in the Baltic Sea

Abstract For determining precise sea surface heights, six marine GNSS (global navigation satellite system) survey campaigns were performed in the eastern Baltic Sea in 2021. Four GNSS antennas were installed on the vessel, the coordinates of which were computed relative to GNSS–CORS (continuously operating reference stations). The GNSS–CORS results are compared to the PPP (precise point positioning)-based results. Better accuracy is associated with the GNSS–CORS postprocessed points; however, the PPP approach provided more accurate results for longer than 40 km baselines. For instance, the a priori vertical accuracy of the PPP solution is, on average, 0.050 ± 0.006 m and more stable along the entire vessel’s survey route. Conversely, the accuracy of CORS-based solutions decreases significantly when the distances from the GNSS–CORS exceed 40 km, whereas the standard deviation between the CORS and PPP-based solutions is up to 0.075 m in these sections. Note that in the harbor (about 4 km from the nearest GNSS–CORS), the standard deviation of vertical differences between the two solutions remains between 0.013 and 0.024 m. In addition, the GNSS antennas situated in different positions on the vessel indicated different measurement accuracies. It is suggested for further studies that at least one GNSS antenna should be mounted above the mass center of the vessel to reduce the effects of the dominating pitch motion during the surveys.