Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning-Based Power Management for Multicore Processors via Idle Period Manipulation

Learning-based dynamic power management (DPM) techniques, being able to adapt to varying system conditions and workloads, have attracted a lot of research attention recently. To the best of our knowledge, however, none of the existing learning-based DPM solutions are dedicated to power reduction in multicore processors, although they can be utilized by treating each processor core as a standalone entity and conducting DPM for them separately. In this paper, by including task allocation into our learning-based DPM framework for multicore processors, we are able to manipulate idle periods on processor cores to achieve a better tradeoff between power consumption and system performance. Experimental results show that the proposed solution significantly outperforms existing DPM techniques.
Estimating non-response bias in a survey on alcohol consumption: comparison of response waves.

AIMS According to 'the continuum of resistance model' late respondents can be used as a proxy for non-respondents in estimating non-response bias. In the present study, the validity of this model was explored and tested in three surveys on alcohol consumption. METHODS The three studies collected their data by means of mailed questionnaires on alcohol consumption whereby two studies also performed a non-response follow-up. RESULTS Comparisons of early respondents, late respondents and non-respondents in one study showed some support for 'the continuum of resistance model', although another study could not confirm this result. Comparison of alcohol consumption between three time response groups showed no significant linear pattern of differences between response waves. CONCLUSIONS The hypothesis that late respondents are more similar to non-respondents than early respondents, could not be confirmed or rejected. Repeated mailings are effective in obtaining a greater sample size, but seem ineffective in improving the representativeness of alcohol consumption surveys.
Comparison of Functional Outcomes of Tibial Plateau Fractures Treated with Nonlocking and Locking Plate Fixations: A Nonrandomized Clinical Trial

Fixation of tibial plateau fractures with plate has been widely used. This prospective study was planned to compare locking plate fixation of tibial plateau fracture with nonlocking methods in terms of their functional outcomes. The subjects of the study were selected from consecutive patients suffering from tibial plateau fractures referred to Kashani Hospital in Isfahan, Iran, between 2012 and 2013 and were candidate for surgery. The final included patients were assigned to two groups, those who were treated with locking plate (n = 20) and those who were treated with nonlocking plates (N = 21). The mean duration of follow-up was 13.4 months (ranging between 10 and 17 months). The mean of knee scores was significantly higher in locking plate group than in nonlocking plate group at the follow-up time (80.20 ± 10.21 versus 72.52 ± 14.75, P = 0.039). Also, the mean VAS pain severity score was significantly lower in locking plate group compared with nonlocking plate group (4.45 ± 2.50 versus 6.00 ± 2.59, P = 0.046). This study confirmed superiority of the locking plate method over nonlocking plate method with regard to knee score as well as VAS pain score.
Quasi-Periodic Frequency Analysis Using Averaging-Extrapolation Methods

We present a new approach to the numerical computation of the basic frequencies of a quasi-periodic signal. Although a complete toolkit for frequency analysis is presented, our methodology is better understood as a refinement process for any of the frequencies, provided we have a rough approximation of the frequency that we wish to compute. The cornerstone of this work is a recently developed method for the computation of Diophantine rotation numbers of circle diffeomorphisms, based on suitable averages of the iterates and Richardson extrapolation. This methodology was successfully extended to compute rotation numbers of quasi-periodic invariant curves of planar maps. In this paper, we address the case of a signal with an arbitrary number of frequencies. The most outstanding aspect of our approach is that frequencies can be calculated with high accuracy at a moderate computational cost, without simultaneously computing the Fourier representation of the signal. The method consists in the construction of a .
Warming shifts top-down and bottom-up control of pond food web structure and function

The effects of global and local environmental changes are transmitted through networks of interacting organisms to shape the structure of communities and the dynamics of ecosystems. We tested the impact of elevated temperature on the top-down and bottom-up forces structuring experimental freshwater pond food webs in western Canada over 16 months. Experimental warming was crossed with treatments manipulating the presence of planktivorous fish and eutrophication through enhanced nutrient supply. We found that higher temperatures produced top-heavy food webs with lower biomass of benthic and pelagic producers, equivalent biomass of zooplankton, zoobenthos and pelagic bacteria, and more pelagic viruses. Eutrophication increased the biomass of all organisms studied, while fish had cascading positive effects on periphyton, phytoplankton and bacteria, and reduced biomass of invertebrates. Surprisingly, virus biomass was reduced in the presence of fish, suggesting the possibility for complex mechanisms of top-down control of the lytic cycle. Warming reduced the effects of eutrophication on periphyton, and magnified the already strong effects of fish on phytoplankton and bacteria. Warming, fish and nutrients all increased whole-system rates of net production despite their distinct impacts on the distribution of biomass between producers and consumers, plankton and benthos, and microbes and macrobes. Our results indicate that warming exerts a host of indirect effects on aquatic food webs mediated through shifts in the magnitudes of top-down and bottom-up forcing.
Light warping for enhanced surface depiction

Recent research on the human visual system shows that our perception of object shape relies in part on compression and stretching of the reflected lighting environment onto its surface. We use this property to enhance the shape depiction of 3D objects by locally warping the environment lighting around main surface features. Contrary to previous work, which require specific illumination, material characteristics and/or stylization choices, our approach enhances surface shape without impairing the desired appearance. Thanks to our novel local shape descriptor, salient surface features are explicitly extracted in a view-dependent fashion at various scales without the need of any pre-process. We demonstrate our system on a variety of rendering settings, using object materials ranging from diffuse to glossy, to mirror or refractive, with direct or global illumination, and providing styles that range from photorealistic to non-photorealistic. The warping itself is very fast to compute on modern graphics hardware, enabling real-time performance in direct illumination scenarios. Note: Third-Party Material Attribution Third-party material used in ACM Transactions on Graphics 28(3), Article 25 - "Light Warping for Enhanced Surface Depiction," by Vergne, Pacanowski, Barla, Granier, and Schlick - was used without proper attribution. The 3D model used in Figures 1, 3, and 5, as well as in the cover image of this volume of the journal, was downloaded from the Shape Repository of AIM@SHAPE Project (http://shapes.aimatshape.net) and is the property of CNR-IMATI. We regret this oversight.
CS 229 FINAL REPORT : UNSUPERVISED LEARNING OF TEMPORALLY COHERENT FEATURES FOR ACTION RECOGNITION

Human vision is remarkably well-adapted to object and action recognition tasks. Without any thought, we can identify a given object regardless of its position in our field of vision or its specific orientation. Our visual system isolates characteristics that define a particular object, or even a particular action, while being invariant to noise. Recent literature suggests that at least some of the brain’s abilities to process visual cues can be explained by temporal coherence, the principle that signals closer together in time are more similar than those that are not. This idea arises from the observation that while models of vision used in machine learning often use still images as training data, humans learn to recognize objects based on a continuous stream of visual input. This continuous stream encodes not only the appearance of an object at a given moment in time, but also the frequencies of various types of transformations. Importantly, the frequency of a transformation correlates negatively with how important it is for object recognition; this fact may contribute to the formation of invariance in the human visual system [1]. In this project, we extend existing strategies for object recognition with temporal coherence to the task of action recognition in video files. We try to learn, in a completely unsupervised manner, filters that respond differently to different types of actions but are invariant to irrelevant transformations. We evaluate performance of our approach using the benchmark KTH action recognition data set, obtaining 88.7% classification accuracy. Further, we experiment with motion recognition and interactive response map applications. We conclude this document with potential directions for developing this project.
Assembly and dynamics of the U4/U6 di-snRNP by single-molecule FRET

In large ribonucleoprotein machines, such as ribosomes and spliceosomes, RNA functions as an assembly scaffold as well as a critical catalytic component. Protein binding to the RNA scaffold can induce structural changes, which in turn modulate subsequent binding of other components. The spliceosomal U4/U6 di-snRNP contains extensively base paired U4 and U6 snRNAs, Snu13, Prp31, Prp3 and Prp4, seven Sm and seven LSm proteins. We have studied successive binding of all protein components to the snRNA duplex during di-snRNP assembly by electrophoretic mobility shift assay and accompanying conformational changes in the U4/U6 RNA 3-way junction by single-molecule FRET. Stems I and II of the duplex were found to co-axially stack in free RNA and function as a rigid scaffold during the entire assembly, but the U4 snRNA 5′ stem-loop adopts alternative orientations each stabilized by Prp31 and Prp3/4 binding accounting for altered Prp3/4 binding affinities in presence of Prp31.
Quantum, higher-spin, local charges in symmetric space sigma models

Potential anomalies are analysed for the local spin-3 and spin-4 classically conserved currents in any two-dimensional sigma model on a compact symmetric space G/H, with G and H classical groups. Quantum local conserved charges are shown to exist in exactly those models which also possess quantum non-local (Yangian) charges. The possibility of larger sets of quantum local charges is discussed and shown to be consistent with known S-matrix results and the behaviour of the corresponding Yangian representations.
Tissue Engineering in Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Sciences

Orthopaedic surgery as a speciality lends itself well to tissue engineering. Many musculoskeletal tissues are frequently damaged or lost in injury and disease, and show a limited capacity for repair. Although orthopaedic surgery has been successful in replacing cartilage, the coming years will establish whether a shift from replacement towards regeneration of tissue is feasible. There has been an increasing interest in tissue engineering approaches to deal with damaged or lost tissue [1-3]. Tissue engineering is an exciting strategy that employs stem cells, scaffolds and growth factors or mediators either in isolation or in combination. It is the expanding science of generating tissue using molecular and cellular techniques, combined with material engineering principles, to replace tissue surgically. This could be in the form of cells with or without matrices. Many tissue engineering advances are being made in orthopaedics and this is partly due to the familiarity with bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells. In this review we will cover mesenchymal stem cells, scaffolds, bioreactors and growth factors applicable to orthopaedics and musculoskeletal sciences. This is followed by specific discussions on Dupuytren’s disease where there is early evidence of stem cell etiology, and bone and cartilage tissue engineering.
MODEL BASED THIN-PLATE SMOOTHING

This paper presents a nonstationary structural spatial model that explicitly sets the data to evolve across a rectangular lattice constrained by secondorder smoothing restrictions. The model exemplifies the concept of model-based spatial smoothing and, in particular, it provides a rationale for the popular discrete thin-plate smoothing method. We show how to use a frequency-domain approach in order to estimate the spatial model via maximum likelihood. In essence, the approach allows both dimensions to be treated separately from each other so that the computational burden associated with the estimation of two-dimensional models is dramatically reduced both in terms of computing time and memory size. Besides, this spectral approach allows straightforward construction of analytic derivatives and an expression for the asymptotic variance of the estimated smoothing parameter is derived with which to construct confidence intervals. Some numerical evidence illustrate the results given.
Do all men attending departments of genitourinary medicine need to be screened for non-gonococcal urethritis?

We investigated the influence of symptoms and signs on the detection of Chlamydia trachomatis, Mycoplasma genitalium and Ureaplasma urealyticum organisms (ureaplasmas) in men with non-gonococcal urethritis (NGU). Two hundred and forty-two men attending the Jefferiss Wing at St Mary's Hospital for a sexual health assessment were evaluated, of whom 169 had NGU. Urethral inflammation was diagnosed if there were either ≥5 polymorphonuclear leucocytes (PMNLs) per high-power field (HPF) in five or more microscope fields of a Gram-stained urethral smear, or ≥10 PMNLs per HPF in five or more fields of a Gram-stained thread from 15-20 mL of a first-passed urine (FPU) specimen. C. trachomatis was diagnosed by direct immunofluoresence, M. genitalium by a polymerase chain reaction assay and ureaplasmas by culture. On multivariate analysis, to control for potential confounding by age, ethnicity, sexual lifestyle and co-infection, an urethral discharge remained significantly associated with the detection of C. trachomatis and M. genitalium in men with acute urethritis [OR 12.3, 95% CI (2.39-63.5) and OR 35.2, 95% CI (3.9-319.6), respectively], but dysuria or penile irritation did not. The detection of ureaplasmas was not associated with any clinical feature. In addition, on multivariate analysis men with NGU who were either symptomatic or had an observable discharge were more likely to have C. trachomatis or M. genitalium detected [(OR 6.92, 95% CI 1.41-33.9) and (OR 5.18, 95% CI 0.99-27.1), respectively], but not ureaplasmas (OR 1.19, 95% CI 0.33-4.35). The findings suggest that in men with acute NGU, symptoms or signs, and in particular a urethral discharge, are associated with the detection of C. trachomatis and M. genitalium, but not ureaplasmas. Currently, there is no precise answer to the question of whether all men attending a GUM clinic need to be screened for NGU, but if clinically asymptomatic NGU is found not to be associated with a sexually transmitted pathogen, the UK clinical guidelines requiring the preparation of a urethral smear from such men would need to be revised.
Bumpless switching controllers

A switching controller is a piecewise linear controller which can change its transfer matrix. If care is not taken in designing such a controller, discontinuities in its output can occur when the controller switches transfer matrices. These surges may saturate the plant input or exert wear on plant components. Often, we can mitigate the effect of these surges by using a bumpless switching controller, a controller in which the output remains continuous despite switching. We show one way to design an observer-based bumpless switching controller as a jump system with an order no greater than that of the plant.
Alleviating Agitation, Apprehension, and Related Symptoms in Geriatric Patients: A Double‐Blind Comparison of a Phenothiazine and a Benzodiazepine

A four-week, double-blind study compared the effectiveness of thioridazine and diazepam in 40 geriatric patients with various symptoms of senility. Patients' progress was evaluated with the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, a Modified Nurses' Observation Scale for Inpatient Evaluation (NOSIE), a global rating of degree of illness, and a global rating of degree of overall change. The data indicate that thioridazine was superior to diazepam in relieving troublesome symptoms of senility.
Pieces of the periphery: A glance into the cartography of Ibibio’s CP domain

Developments in cartographic observations of clause structure in Generative syntax predict strong formal linguistic universals among the ordering of phrases at the clausal edge. This ordering is assumed to result from a predetermined hierarchy that is defined by Universal Grammar (UG), reflecting an innate biological capacity for language in humans (Rizzi, 1989, p. 66). Ibibio, a Niger-Congo language, features a rich left periphery whose components demonstrate this hierarchical ordering. Through the interaction of leftperipheral phenomena such as Argument Focus, Partial whmovement, Q markers, and complementizers, this ordering is revealed. If Ibibio’s phrasal ordering differs from Rizzi’s proposed structure in (1), then the universality of Rizzi’s left periphery would be compromised. In addition to the phrases that Rizzi (1997) finds through Italian, Ibibio’s grammar parameterizes the activation of an additional phrase. We will find that the underlying order of Ibibio’s phrases does hold up to the posited hierarchy, supporting Rizzi’s (1997) proposition of the ordering of the left periphery in UG. Here is a comparison of these two peripheral structures:
Comparative evaluations of the processed bovine tunica vaginalis implant in a rat model

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the lyophilized and glycerolized bovine parietal tunica vaginalis for repair of a full-thickness abdominal wall defect and to compare their effectiveness with expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) Mycro Mesh (Gore-Tex® MYCRO MESH®; Gore and Designs, W. L. Gore & Associates, Flagstaff, AZ, USA) in a rat model. Fresh bovine parietal tunica vaginalis sacs collected from an abattoir were processed and preserved by freeze-drying and by using 99.5% glycerol. Full-thickness abdominal wall defects (3×2.5 cm) created surgically in 90 male Sprague-Dewaly rats (300–400 g) were repaired with the same size of lyophilized, glycerolized or ePTFE Mycro Mesh with 30 rats in each group. Six rats from each group were killed at post-implantation intervals of 1, 3, 6, 9 and 18 weeks for macroscopic, microscopic and tensiometric evaluations. All rats survived the procedure, except for one rat in the ePTFE Mycro Mesh group. Implants of bovine origin were gradually resorbed and replaced with recipient fibrous tissue, whereas the mesh implant was encapsulated with fibrous tissue and remained without any marked changes throughout the study period. Adhesions between the implant and underlying visceral organs were encountered in 10, 6.6 and 3.3% of rats implanted with lyophilized, glycerolized or ePTFE Mycro Mesh, respectively. Foreign body giant cells and calcification were demonstrated in fibrous capsule and mesh matrix, respectively, in rats implanted with ePTFE Mycro Mesh. Neither of these characteristics were observed in rats implanted with processed bovine tunica vaginalis. Macrophages engorged with lipofuchsin pigments were observed in the recipient tissue that replaced the implants of bovine origin at 3–18 weeks post-implantation. There were no significant (P > 0.05) differences in total mean values of healing tensile strength, load at break and Young’s modulus of elasticity between the three implant groups. The results of the present study encourage further investigation into the use of processed bovine parietal tunica vaginalis in clinical practice.
Long-term immunologic response to antiretroviral therapy in low-income countries: a collaborative analysis of prospective studies

Background: Few data are available on the long-term immunologic response to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in resource-limited settings, where ART is being rapidly scaled up using a public health approach, with a limited repertoire of drugs. Objectives: To describe immunologic response to ART among ART patients in a network of cohorts from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Study population/methods: Treatment-naive patients aged 15 and older from 27 treatment programs were eligible. Multilevel, linear mixed models were used to assess associations between predictor variables and CD4 cell count trajectories following ART initiation. Results: Of 29 175 patients initiating ART, 8933 (31%) were excluded due to insufficient follow-up time and early lost to follow-up or death. The remaining 19 967 patients contributed 39 200 person-years on ART and 71 067 CD4 cell count measurements. The median baseline CD4 cell count was 114 cells/μl, with 35% having less than 100 cells/μl. Substantial intersite variation in baseline CD4 cell count was observed (range 61–181 cells/μl). Women had higher median baseline CD4 cell counts than men (121 vs. 104 cells/μl). The median CD4 cell count increased from 114 cells/μl at ART initiation to 230 [interquartile range (IQR) 144–338] at 6 months, 263 (IQR 175–376) at 1 year, 336 (IQR 224–472) at 2 years, 372 (IQR 242–537) at 3 years, 377 (IQR 221–561) at 4 years, and 395 (IQR 240–592) at 5 years. In multivariable models, baseline CD4 cell count was the most important determinant of subsequent CD4 cell count trajectories. Conclusion: These data demonstrate robust and sustained CD4 response to ART among patients remaining on therapy. Public health and programmatic interventions leading to earlier HIV diagnosis and initiation of ART could substantially improve patient outcomes in resource-limited settings.
The ASVspoof 2017 Challenge: Assessing the Limits of Replay Spoofing Attack Detection

The ASVspoof initiative was created to promote the development of countermeasures which aim to protect automatic speaker veriﬁcation (ASV) from spooﬁng attacks. The ﬁrst community-led, common evaluation held in 2015 focused on countermeasures for speech synthesis and voice conversion spooﬁng attacks. Arguably, however, it is replay attacks which pose the greatest threat. Such attacks involve the replay of recordings collected from enrolled speakers in order to provoke false alarms and can be mounted with greater ease using everyday consumer devices. ASVspoof 2017, the second in the series, hence focused on the development of replay attack countermeasures. This paper describes the database, protocols and initial ﬁndings. The evaluation entailed highly heterogeneous acoustic recording and replay conditions which increased the equal error rate (EER) of a baseline ASV system from 1.76% to 30.71%. Submissions were received from 49 research teams, 20 of which improved upon a baseline replay spooﬁng detector EER of 24.65%, in terms of replay/non-replay discrimination. While largely successful, the evaluation indicates that the quest for countermeasures which are resilient in the face of variable replay attacks remains very much alive.