Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Twenty-Seven Year Response of South Carolina Coastal Plain Forests Affected by Hurricane Hugo

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo inflicted catastrophic damage on approximately 1.8 million ha of forested land in South Carolina. The purpose of this study was to monitor species compositional shifts and structural changes in several forest types following the hurricane’s disturbance. The immediate consequences of hurricane damage are well documented, but there are few studies based on the long-term compositional and structural changes that may result from hurricane disturbance, especially in temperate forest ecosystems. Forty-two forested plots were monitored within four study areas that received varying degrees of hurricane damage. Inventories included species, damage class, tree diameter, and regeneration. The objectives of this study were (1) to compare the recovery speed of wetland forests (e.g., bottomland hardwood swamps and cypress-tupelo swamps) to that of upland pine and hardwood forests; (2) to discover how the degree of hurricane damage can affect the timing and the pattern of forest recovery in the coastal plain; and (3) to compare individual species response patterns across different forest types and at different levels of initial damage. Over the 27-year period following the hurricane, successional pathways have been variable among plots of different forest types and intensity of initial disturbance. We have observed an expected increase in basal area (BA) following the disturbance. Sapling populations in many species have increased dramatically, and some of these populations have begun to thin in recent years. In several forest types, loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.—not a predominant species in these sites prior to the hurricane) responded quickly and overtook some dominant species in BA and tree/sapling abundance. Several other species that were not a major component of the tree strata (wax myrtle [Morella cerifera (L.) Small], green ash [Fraxinus pennsylvanica Marsh. ], and the invasive Chinese tallow [Triadica sebifera (L.) Small]) showed a large increase in sapling population. Overall, recovery speed and species resilience were specific to forest types and damage severity. The intensity and frequency of hurricanes may increase in the future as sea surface temperatures rise. Understanding how coastal forests respond to major hurricanes in the short-term and the long-term will aid us in preparing for future hurricanes and for potential changes in disturbance regimes.
New results on the radio-far-infrared relation for galaxies

The radio-FIR relation has been decomposed into thermal bremsstrahlung-FIR and synchrotron-FIR relation for a sample of 31 galaxies. Both radio emission components are tightly correlated with the FIR emission for early and late-type spiral as well as irregular galaxies. It follows that any mixture of the radio components produces a tight universal radio-FIR relation. At high radio frequencies, thermal bremsstrahlung can dominate the radio emission over a large range of luminosities so that the slope of the radio-FIR relation approaches that of the thermal bremsstrahlung-FIR relation and is therefore close to unity (0.97 +/- 0.02). At lower frequencies, synchrotron emission dominates and the slope approaches that of the synchrotron-FIR ratio which is significantly steeper than unity (1.33 +/- 0.10). The results are consistent with a scenario in which the FIR luminosities of galaxies scale in direct proportion to the star formation rate.
Budidaya Benih Lobster Pasir (Panulirus Homarus) Dengan Resirculation Aquaculture System (Ras) Di Pokdakan “Pesona Bahari”, Grand Watudodol, Banyuwangi

Puerulus or lobster seed (Panulirus homarus) often found in Banyuwangi teritory, in line with government regulations that prohibit to export lobster seeds, Lobster seed trading with seed size segmentation can be an alternative to improve the economy of people who are running the Covid19 pandemic. Seed size segmentation is needed because lobster cultivation as a consumption measure takes a long time. One of the efforts made in its cultivation in order to obtain growth rate and survival rate is Recirculation Aquaculture System (RAS). The aim of this activity is to produce “cricket” size seeds raised by RAS. Cultivation activities was carried out 2 months with different types of feed. Parameters measured every two weeks are growth and survival rate. Water quality measured every day were temperature, DO, pH and salinity, while ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate were measured every two weeks. The results obtained was 100% survival rate.
Enhancement of short-circuit current density in polymer bulk heterojunction solar cells comprising plasmonic silver nanowires

We demonstrate that the influence of plasmonic effects based on silver nanowires (Ag NWs) on the characteristics of polymer solar cells (PSCs). The solution-processed Ag NWs are situated at the interface of anode buffer layer and active layer, which could enhance the performance especially the photocurrent of PSCs by scattering, localized surface plasmon resonance, and surface plasmon polaritons. Plasmonic effects are confirmed by the enhancement of extinction spectra, external quantum efficiency, and steady state photoluminescence. Consequently, the short-circuit current density (Jsc) and power conversion efficiency enhance about 24% and 18%, respectively, under AM1.5 illumination when Ag NWs plasmonic nanostructure incorporated into PSCs.
Ischemia with Nonobstructive Coronary Artery Disease and Atrial Cardiomyopathy—Two Sides of the Same Story?

Ischemia with nonobstructive coronary artery disease (INOCA) is increasingly recognized as a significant cause of angina, myocardial remodeling, and eventually heart failure (HF). Coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD) is a major endotype of INOCA, and it is caused by structural and functional alterations of the coronary microcirculation. At the same time, atrial cardiomyopathy (ACM) defined by structural, functional, and electrical atrial remodeling has a major clinical impact due to its manifestations: atrial fibrillation (AF), atrial thrombosis, stroke, and HF symptoms. Both these pathologies share similar risk factors and have a high comorbidity burden. CMD causing INOCA and ACM frequently coexist. Thus, questions arise whether there is a potential link between these pathologies. Does CMD promote AF or the reverse? Which are the mechanisms that ultimately lead to CMD and ACM? Are both part of a systemic disease characterized by endothelial dysfunction? Lastly, which are the therapeutic strategies that can target endothelial dysfunction and improve the prognosis of patients with CMD and ACM? This review aims to address these questions by analyzing the existing body of evidence, offering further insight into the mechanisms of CMD and ACM, and discussing potential therapeutic strategies.
An Eigenvalue problem for holomorphic solutions to a certain class of functional differential equations

In this paper, we study a class of linear functional differential equations of which the pantograph equation is a prominent member. Specifically, we study the existence of solutions holomorphic at a fixed point of the functional argument. The local theory for equations with attracting fixed points is known [17, 13], but little is known about the case where the fixed point is repelling. We formulate an eigenvalue problem for the repelling fixed point case and show that the corresponding spectrum is discrete. Hence, that holomorphic solutions occur only as special cases. The second order pantograph equation is used to illustrate this result. A key step in this process is to reformulate the problem in terms of a compact operator. Aside from exploiting well known results for the spectra of such operators, we use results such as the Fredholm Alternative to derive existence results for the non-homogeneous problem.
Numerical Simulation for Vortex Structure in a Turbopump Inducer: Close Relationship With Appearance of Cavitation Instabilities

Unsteady cavitation phenomena such as rotating cavitation and cavitation surge are often observed in a turbopump inducer of a rocket engine, sometimes causing undesirable oscillation of the system. Investigation of their mechanism and prediction of such unsteady phenomena are, therefore, crucial in the design of inducers. As many experiments have shown, the appearance of cavitation instability is highly related to the flow rate as well as to the inlet casing geometry. Experimental observations have shown that a very complex flow structure, including such phenomena as backflow and vortices, appears upstream of the inducer. In this work, therefore, we conducted 3D unsteady computational fluid dynamics simulations of noncavitating flow in a turbopump inducer, mainly focusing on the vortex structure, for three types of inlet casing geometry with various flow rates. Simulation results showed that the vortex structure for the geometry of the inlet casing and that for the flow rate differed. Especially, it was found that development of the tip leakage vortex was dependent on the inlet casing geometry and the flow rate. This tendency is analogous to that observed between the appearance of rotating cavitation and the casing geometry and flow rate in cavitation tunnel tests. This result strongly implies that the tip leakage vortex is responsible for the appearance of rotating cavitation. By adding a gutter to the inlet casing, it was found that backflow was completely confined to the gutter regardless of flow rates. This numerical result implies that the volume of cavity generated in the backflow region should be stable despite a change of the flow rate, resulting in the suppression of increase of the mass flow gain factor. This result also supports the experimental result that cavitation surge was effectively suppressed using such a casing with a gutter.
A Review of Different Types of Liposomes and Their Advancements as a Form of Gene Therapy Treatment for Breast Cancer

Breast cancer incidence and mortality rates have increased exponentially during the last decade, particularly among female patients. Current therapies, including surgery and chemotherapy, have significant negative physical and mental impacts on patients. As a safer alternative, gene therapy utilising a therapeutic gene with the potential to treat various ailments is being considered. Delivery of the gene generally utilises viral vectors. However, immunological reactions and even mortality have been recorded as side effects. As a result, non-viral vectors, such as liposomes, a system composed of lipid bilayers formed into nanoparticles, are being studied. Liposomes have demonstrated tremendous potential due to their limitless ability to combine many functions into a system with desirable characteristics and functionality. This article discusses cationic, anionic, and neutral liposomes with their stability, cytotoxicity, transfection ability, cellular uptake, and limitation as a gene carrier suitable for gene therapy specifically for cancer. Due to the more practical approach of employing electrostatic contact with the negatively charged nucleic acid and the cell membrane for absorption purposes, cationic liposomes appear to be more suited for formulation for gene delivery and therapy for breast cancer treatment. As the other alternatives have numerous complicated additional modifications, attachments need to be made to achieve a functional gene therapy system for breast cancer treatment, which were also discussed in this review. This review aimed to increase understanding and build a viable breast cancer gene therapy treatment strategy.
Hierarchical Multi-Class Classification of Voice Disorders Using Self-Supervised Models and Glottal Features

Previous studies on the automatic classification of voice disorders have mostly investigated the binary classification task, which aims to distinguish pathological voice from healthy voice. Using multi-class classifiers, however, more fine-grained identification of voice disorders can be achieved, which is more helpful for clinical practitioners. Unfortunately, there is little publicly available training data for many voice disorders, which lowers the classification performance on data from unseen speakers. Earlier studies have shown that the usage of glottal source features can reduce data redundancy in detection of laryngeal voice disorders. Another approach to tackle the problems caused by scarcity of training data is to utilize deep learning models, such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT, that have been pre-trained on larger databases. Since the aforementioned approaches have not been thoroughly studied in the multi-class classification of voice disorders, they will be jointly studied in the present work. In addition, we study a hierarchical classifier, which enables task-wise feature optimization and more efficient utilization of data. In this work, the aforementioned three approaches are compared with traditional mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features and one-vs-rest and one-vs-one SVM classifiers. The results in a 3-class classification problem between healthy voice and two laryngeal disorders (hyperfunctional dysphonia and vocal fold paresis) indicate that all the studied methods outperform the baselines. The best performance was achieved by using features from wav2vec 2.0 LARGE together with hierarchical classification. The balanced classification accuracy of the system was 62.77% for male speakers, and 55.36% for female speakers, which outperformed the baseline systems by an absolute improvement of 15.76% and 6.95% for male and female speakers, respectively.
Novel Waveguide Directional Couplers Using Left-handed Materials

Two novel directional couplers composing of two parallel-plate waveguides filled with layered right-handed material (RHM) and left-handed material (LHM) are proposed in this paper. Transverse magnetic (TM) modes are generated by an infinite-long line source at the input port of one waveguide. In general, the energy will be coupled into another waveguide through small holes on the common wall. Under certain conditions the energy will be enhanced in one direction which is called as the coupled port and will be isolated in another direction which is called as the isolated port. If the coupled waveguide is filled with LHM, the power density will change its direction, which is opposite to that of the coupler filled with pure RHM. If the coupled waveguide is filled with layered RHM and LHM, there will be two directional couplers simultaneously in one waveguide. Exact analysis is given and numerical results validate our conclusions.
Whole Transcriptome Analysis of Hypothalamus in Mice during Short-Term Starvation

Molecular profiling of the hypothalamus in response to metabolic shifts is a critical cue to better understand the principle of the central control of whole-body energy metabolism. The transcriptional responses of the rodent hypothalamus to short-term calorie restriction have been documented. However, studies on the identification of hypothalamic secretory factors that potentially contribute to the control of appetite are lacking. In this study, we analyzed the differential expression of hypothalamic genes and compared the selected secretory factors from the fasted mice with those of fed control mice using bulk RNA-sequencing. We verified seven secretory genes that were significantly altered in the hypothalamus of fasted mice. In addition, we determined the response of secretory genes in cultured hypothalamic cells to treatment with ghrelin and leptin. The current study provides further insights into the neuronal response to food restriction at the molecular level and may be useful for understanding the hypothalamic control of appetite.
Exploring the Interactions of Oncolytic Viral Therapy and Immunotherapy of Anti-CTLA-4 for Malignant Melanoma Mice Model

Oncolytic ability to direct target and lyse tumor cells makes oncolytic virus therapy (OVT) a promising approach to treating cancer. Despite its therapeutic potential to stimulate anti-tumor immune responses, it also has immunosuppressive effects. The efficacy of OVTs as monotherapies can be enhanced by appropriate adjuvant therapy such as anti-CTLA-4. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model to explore the interactions of combined therapy of oncolytic viruses and a checkpoint inhibitor, anti-CTLA-4. The model incorporates both the susceptible and infected tumor populations, natural killer cell population, virus population, tumor-specific immune populations, virus-specific immune populations, tumor suppressive cytokine IFN-g, and the effect of immune checkpoint inhibitor CTLA-4. In particular, we distinguish the tumor-specific immune abilities of CD8+ T, NK cells, and CD4+ T cells and describe the destructive ability of cytokine on tumor cells as well as the inhibitory capacity of CTLA-4 on various components. Our model is validated through the experimental results. We also investigate various dosing strategies to improve treatment outcomes. Our study reveals that tumor killing rate by cytokines, cytokine decay rate, and tumor growth rate play important roles on both the OVT monotherapy and the combination therapy. Moreover, parameters related to CD8+ T cell killing have a large impact on treatment outcomes with OVT alone, whereas parameters associated with IFN-g strongly influence treatment responses for the combined therapy. We also found that virus killing by NK cells may halt the desired spread of OVs and enhance the probability of tumor escape during the treatment. Our study reveals that it is the activation of host anti-tumor immune system responses rather than its direct destruction of the tumor cells plays a major biological function of the combined therapy.
Zero-shot versus Many-shot: Unsupervised Texture Anomaly Detection

Research on unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) has recently progressed, significantly increasing detection accuracy. This paper focuses on texture images and considers how few normal samples are needed for accurate AD. We first highlight the critical nature of the problem that previous studies have overlooked: accurate detection gets harder for anisotropic textures when image orientations are not aligned between inputs and normal samples. We then propose a zero-shot method, which detects anomalies without using a normal sample. The method is free from the issue of unaligned orientation between input and normal images. It assumes the input texture to be homogeneous, detecting image regions that break the homogeneity as anomalies. We present a quantitative criterion to judge whether this assumption holds for an input texture. Experimental results show the broad applicability of the proposed zero-shot method and its good performance comparable to or even higher than the state-of-the-art methods using hundreds of normal samples. The code and data are available from https://drive.google. com/drive/folders/10OyPzvI3H6llCZBxKxFlKWt1Pw1tkMK1.
Equalizing With Fractionally-Spaced Constant Modulus And Second-Order-Statistics Blind Receivers

This dissertation is concerned with the blind, cold-start equalization of a closed-eye, fractionally-spaced channel, so that the error rate is suuciently reduced for transfer to a decision directed mode. First, a simulated comparison study of recently proposed second-order-statistics (SOS) algorithms and the constant modulus algorithm (CMA) shows a severe lack of robustness for the SOS algorithms to practical situations, while to the contrary, CMA appears quite robust. Next, a class of cyclic all-pass channels is shown to be the only channel class whose cascade with a core channel results in no change in the SOS indicators used by many SOS algorithms. This ambiguity raises robustness concerns for SOS algorithms due to the possibility of channel mis-identiication. The sequel focuses on the robustness properties of fractionally-spaced CMA. Though the literature contains reasonable treatment for CMA's robustness properties to violation of three of the four perfect equalization assumptions, essentially no analytical work exists for the undeniably practical case when the equalizer length is less than that needed for perfect equalization. Original algebraic analysis is presented for the constant modulus (CM) cost function, describing the deformation of the CM error surface due to undermodeling. The analysis is connected to previous work on CMA misadjustment, suggesting that similar to noisy LMS, a longer fractionally-spaced equalizer (FSE) is not always better than a shorter FSE. Next, a truncated Taylor series of the binary CM cost function is used to estimate the location of the undermodeled CM minima. A measure is proposed from this estimate to determine the proximity of CM and mean squared error (MSE) minima, suggesting that those CM minima with better MSE performance stay closer to their corresponding Wiener solutions than those CM minima with worse MSE performance. This dissertation can be used to determine design guidelines for length selection of a FSE updated by CMA (CMA-FSE) given speciic signalling formats and channel models. Together, this work and the recent work of others can be used to establish a cohesive behavioral theory of CMA-FSE describing the robustness properties of the CM criterion to practical situations. iii To Joe and Viv: my parents, my inspiration, my friends. To Jerry Garcia: Long ago under a hot Texas sun I heard the strangest sound emanating from my sister's room. What did I know, I thought that tone was normal and that everyone knew about it. It took a number of years (and a seventh grade math …
A modified Blahut algorithm for decoding Reed-Solomon codes beyond half the minimum distance

A modification of the Blahut algorithm is proposed for decoding Reed-Solomon codes beyond half the minimum distance. An RS code is described as an (n, k) code, where the codeword consists of n symbols from a Galois field of q elements, k of which are information symbols, with r=(n-k) check symbols. We define the minimum distance, d=r+1, and the maximum number of error symbols that can be corrected, t. An effective method is offered for searching the unknown discrepancies needed for analytical continuation of the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm through two additional iterations. This reduces the search time by 2(q-1)n/((n+t+1)(n-t)) times compared to the Blahut algorithm. An architecture of a searcher for unknown discrepancies is given. The coding gain of the proposed algorithm is shown for some practical codes.
Experimental Evidence vs. Experimental Practice?

Until relatively recently it was not common for (Anglophone) philosophers of science to treat experiment as a subject in its own right. If at all, it was treated under the heading 'observation and experiment' where it was clear that the latter referred simply to observations which required more elaborate preparations. These were not preparations which materially altered the observations to which they led. 'Experiment' may have been recognized as one of the two distinguishing features of modern science (mathematically articulated theories being the other), but only because 'experimental science' was used as a synonym for 'empirical science,' a science built on observation. In the image of science, maintained by positivism and its descendants, there is no other possible role for experiment. In that image the vehicle (the concrete embodiment) of science is a deductively articulated body of propositions which our minds behold and this body of propositions constitutes scientific knowledge if we have come to see that it corresponds in some canonical way to nature. Anything done to prepare the vehicle or lead the mind to behold the canonical correspondences is external to science, an instrument not integral to the end which it serves, a process incidental to its product.