Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pop-level and access-link-level traffic dynamics in a tier-1 POP

In this paper, we study traffic demands in an IP bacbkone, identify the routes used by these demands, and evaluate traffic granularity levels that are attractive for improving the poor load balancing that our study reveals. The data used in this study was collected at a major POP in a commercial Tier-1 IP backbone. In the first part of this paper we ask two questions. What is the traffic demand between a pair of POPs in the backbone? How stable is this demand? We develop a methodology that combines packet-level traces from access links in the POP and BGP routing information to build components of POP-to-POP traffic matrices. Our analysis shows that the geographic spread of traffic across egress POPs is far from uniform. In addition, we find that the time of day behaviors for different POPs and different access links also exhibit a high degree of heterogeneity. In the second part of this work, we examine commercial routing practices to assess how these demands are routed through the backbone. We find that traffic between a pair of POPs is engineered to be restricted to a few paths and that this contributes to widely varying link utilization levels. The natural question that follows from these findings is whether or not there is a better way to spread the traffic across backbone paths. We identify traffic aggregates based on destination address prefixes and find that this set of criteria isolates a few aggregates that account for an overwhelmingly large portion of inter-POP traffic. We demonstrate that these aggregates exhibit stability throughout the day on per-hour time scales, and thus form a natural basis for splitting traffic over multiple paths to improve load balancing.
Nonsymmetric algebraic Riccati equations associated with an M-matrix: recent advances and algorithms

We survey theoretical properties and algorithms concerning the problem of solving a nonsymmetric algebraic Riccati equation, and we report on some known methods and new algorithmic advances. In particular, some results on the number of positive solutions are proved and a careful convergence analysis of Newton’s iteration is carried out in the cases of interest where some singularity conditions are encountered. From this analysis we determine initial approximations which still guarantee the quadratic convergence.
The course of events: counterfactuals, causal sequences, and explanation

[Extract] Causal explanations can help us understand why events change course, and why the world turned out differently to what we might have expected. Even in understanding simple narratives of events, people form mental representations that incorporate causal inferences (e.g., Graesser et al. 1981; Hilton 1985; Read 1987; Schank and Abelson 1977; Trabasso and Sperry 1985; Trabasso and van den Broek 1985; Wilensky 1983). In addition, research on counterfactual reasoning has also used simple narratives to explore which factors are likely to be mutated (e.g., Byrne et al. 2000; Wells et al. 1987), and has demonstrated the complexity of the mental representations of these narratives through showing, among other things, that people do not always mutate causes when responding to counterfactual "if only" probes (Mandel and Lehman 1996; N'gbala and Branscombe 1995). Finally, in their analysis of close counterfactuals, Kahneman and Varey (1990) argue that people not only represent what happened, but also what almost happened.
What WOMAC pain score should make a patient eligible for a trial in knee osteoarthritis?

OBJECTIVE To evaluate different Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) pain thresholds as eligibility criteria for a knee osteoarthritis (OA) trial and their effect on number of subjects recruited. METHODS We screened subjects with knee pain using the Likert version of the WOMAC and scored all subjects based on the severity of pain with each of the 5 WOMAC activities. For each of 4 alternative definitions of eligibility, we tested how many subjects would be eligible for a trial. RESULTS Two hundred thirty-four subjects with chronic knee pain completed the WOMAC pain survey. If we required a score of > or = 4 and at least 2 activities with at least moderate pain, we found 128 of these subjects were eligible. If we required only one activity with moderate pain, the number increased to 139 (by 9%), and further to 161 (by 26%) if we required the same overall WOMAC score but no activity with at least moderate pain. The most common activity causing moderate or greater pain was going up or down stairs. CONCLUSION The number of subjects recruitable for an OA trial depends on the WOMAC pain threshold required. Raising the threshold will lower the number of subjects modestly, but include more persons with moderate to severe pain. Lowering it may include many with only mild pain with activity.
Higher Order Differential Analysis of NORX

In this paper, we analyse the higher order differential properties of NORX, an AEAD scheme submitted to CAESAR competition. NORX is a sponge based construction. Previous efforts, by the designers themselves, have focused on the first order differentials and rotational properties for a small number of steps of the NORX core permutation, which turn out to have quite low biases when extended to the full permutation. In our work, the higher order differential properties are identified that allow to come up with practical distinguishers of the 4-round full permutation for NORX64 and half round less than the full permutation (i.e., 3.5-round) for NORX32. These distinguishers are similar to zero-sum distinguishers but are probabilistic in nature rather than deterministic, and are of order as low as four. The distinguishers have very low complexities, and are significantly more efficient than the generic generalized birthday attack for the same configurations of zero-sums. While these distinguishers identify sharper non-randomness than what the designers identified, our results do not lend themselves for cryptanalysis of full-round NORX encryption or authentication.
REGRESSION OF A DISSEMINATED SYNGENEIC SOLID TUMOR

Specific adoptive immunotherapy is a theoretically attractive approach to the treatment of tumors, although few examples exist of the effective treatment of established syngeneic solid tumors by this approach (1). Early reports described the use of large numbers of thoracic duct lymphocytes from immunized animals (2) as well as lymphocytes from immunized allogeneic and xenogeneic animals (3) in an attempt to eradicate solid tumors. Borberg et al. (4) treated Meth A sarcomas with up to 4 × 109 immunized syngeneic lymphocytes and succeeded in causing regression of established tumors. Using the Meth A tumor, but an alternative method of immunization, Berendt and North (5) demonstrated that the intravenous infusion of sensitized T cells from immune donors could cause complete regression of large established tumors growing in T cell-deficient hosts. They also showed that infusion of splenic T cells from tumor-bearing donors could inhibit this regression of established tumor, suggesting that failure to reject this tumor was the result of suppressor T cells in the tumor-bearing host. Fernandez-Cruz et al. (6) showed that intravenous infusion of immune lymphocytes was capable of curing irradiated rats bearing a subcutaneous tumor. A common factor in these adoptive immunotherapy investigations was the large number of sensitized lymphocytes that were required to cause the regression of established solid tumors. Because the expansion of lymphoid cells in interleukin 2 (IL-2) 1 is capable of generating large numbers of specifically immune cells, we have explored the possible use of these cells for the adoptive immunotherapy of a solid tumor. T lymphocytes expanded in IL-2 retain cytotoxic as well as other functional immunologic properties, and individual lymphocytes can he cloned to large cell numbers without loss of immunologic specificity (7-11). Using these techniques, we have demonstrated that specifically sensitized cells expanded in lectin-free IL-2 (LF-IL-2) were capable of mediating allogeneic skin graft rejection (12) when adoptively transferred to normal hosts. More recently, we have established long-term T lymphoid lines specifically lytic for the syngeneic FBL-3 lymphoma (13) and have successfully used these ceils in the adoptive chemoimmunotherapy of a disseminated micrometastatic tumor (14).
Multiple Changes in Peptide and Lipid Expression Associated with Regeneration in the Nervous System of the Medicinal Leech

Background The adult medicinal leech central nervous system (CNS) is capable of regenerating specific synaptic circuitry after a mechanical lesion, displaying evidence of anatomical repair within a few days and functional recovery within a few weeks. In the present work, spatiotemporal changes in molecular distributions during this phenomenon are explored. Moreover, the hypothesis that neural regeneration involves some molecular factors initially employed during embryonic neural development is tested. Results Imaging mass spectrometry coupled to peptidomic and lipidomic methodologies allowed the selection of molecules whose spatiotemporal pattern of expression was of potential interest. The identification of peptides was aided by comparing MS/MS spectra obtained for the peptidome extracted from embryonic and adult tissues to leech transcriptome and genome databases. Through the parallel use of a classical lipidomic approach and secondary ion mass spectrometry, specific lipids, including cannabinoids, gangliosides and several other types, were detected in adult ganglia following mechanical damage to connected nerves. These observations motivated a search for possible effects of cannabinoids on neurite outgrowth. Exposing nervous tissues to Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid (TRPV) receptor agonists resulted in enhanced neurite outgrowth from a cut nerve, while exposure to antagonists blocked such outgrowth. Conclusion The experiments on the regenerating adult leech CNS reported here provide direct evidence of increased titers of proteins that are thought to play important roles in early stages of neural development. Our data further suggest that endocannabinoids also play key roles in CNS regeneration, mediated through the activation of leech TRPVs, as a thorough search of leech genome databases failed to reveal any leech orthologs of the mammalian cannabinoid receptors but revealed putative TRPVs. In sum, our observations identify a number of lipids and proteins that may contribute to different aspects of the complex phenomenon of leech nerve regeneration, establishing an important base for future functional assays.
NUSTAR AND XMM-NEWTON OBSERVATIONS OF THE EXTREME ULTRALUMINOUS X-RAY SOURCE NGC 5907 ULX1: A VANISHING ACT

We present results obtained from two broadband X-ray observations of the extreme ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) NGC 5907 ULX1, known to have a peak X-ray luminosity of ∼5 × 1040 erg s−1. These XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observations, separated by only ∼4 days, revealed an extreme level of short-term flux variability. In the first epoch, NGC 5907 ULX1 was undetected by NuSTAR, and only weakly detected (if at all) with XMM-Newton, while in the second NGC 5907 ULX1 was clearly detected at high luminosity by both missions. This implies an increase in flux of ∼2 orders of magnitude or more during this ∼4 day window. We argue that this is likely due to a rapid rise in the mass accretion rate, rather than to a transition from an extremely obscured to an unobscured state. During the second epoch we observed the broadband 0.3–20.0 keV X-ray luminosity to be (1.55 ± 0.06) × 1040 erg s−1, similar to the majority of the archival X-ray observations. The broadband X-ray spectrum obtained from the second epoch is inconsistent with the low/hard accretion state observed in Galactic black hole binaries, but is well modeled with a simple accretion disk model incorporating the effects of photon advection. This strongly suggests that when bright, NGC 5907 ULX1 is a high-Eddington accretor.
Hybrid feature selection and peptide binding affinity prediction using an EDA based algorithm

Protein function prediction is an important problem in functional genomics. Typically, protein sequences are represented by feature vectors. A major problem of protein datasets that increase the complexity of classification models is their large number of features. The process of drug discovery often involves the use of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models to identify chemical structures that could have good inhibitory effects on specific targets and have low toxicity (non-specific activity). QSAR models are regression or classification models used in the chemical and biological sciences. Because of high dimensionality problems, a feature selection problem is imminent. In this study, we thus employ a hybrid Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) based filter-wrapper methodology to simultaneously extract informative feature subsets and build robust QSAR models. The performance of the algorithm was tested on the benchmark classification challenge datasets obtained from the CoePRa competition platform, developed in 2006. Our results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of a hybrid EDA filter-wrapper algorithm in comparison to the results reported earlier.
Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation Revisited: A Mismatched Decoding Perspective

We revisit the information-theoretic analysis of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) by modeling the BICM decoder as a mismatched decoder. The mismatched decoding model is well defined for finite, yet arbitrary, block lengths, and naturally captures the channel memory among the bits belonging to the same symbol. We give two independent proofs of the achievability of the BICM capacity calculated by Caire et al., where BICM was modeled as a set of independent parallel binary-input channels whose output is the bitwise log-likelihood ratio. Our first achievability proof uses typical sequences, and shows that due to the random coding construction, the interleaver is not required. The second proof is based on the random coding error exponents with mismatched decoding, where the largest achievable rate is the generalized mutual information. Moreover, the generalized mutual information of the mismatched decoder coincides with the infinite-interleaver BICM capacity. We show that the error exponent-and hence the cutoff rate-of the BICM mismatched decoder is upper-bounded by that of coded modulation and may thus be lower than in the infinite-interleaved model; for binary reflected Gray mapping in Gaussian channels the loss in error exponent is small. We also consider the mutual information appearing in the analysis of iterative decoding of BICM with extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts: if the symbol metric has knowledge of the transmitted symbol, EXIT mutual information admits a representation as a pseudo-generalized mutual information, which is in general not achievable. A different symbol decoding metric, for which the extrinsic side information refers to the hypothesized symbol, induces a generalized mutual information lower than the coded modulation capacity. In this case, perfect extrinsic side information turns the mismatched-decoder error exponent into that of coded modulation.
Test generation and verification for highly sequential circuits

A novel test procedure that exploits the structure of the combinational logic in the circuit as well as the sequential behavior of the circuit is presented. Initially, before test generation, separate sum-of-product representations of the complete or partial ON-sets and OFF-sets of each of the flip-flop inputs and primary outputs of the sequential circuit are extracted using the PODEM algorithm. Fast algorithms for state justification and state differentiation based on this representation are described. The algorithm developed for test generation is extended to verification of finite-state machines (FSMs). The algorithm for state differentiation based on the ON- and OFF-set representation is modified for verification purposes. The authors present experimental results that illustrate the superior performance of this approach as compared to previous approaches to FSM verification. They are able to verify examples with significantly more memory elements than previous approaches. >
Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation: A Reinterpretation of Reinhart's Approach *

Syntactic structure constrains the possible "coreference" relations between the noun phrases in a sentence. Since the early days of generative syntax, we have learned a great deal about the nature of these structural constraints. Much of this syntactic theorizing has been possible with only a vague and informal understanding of what it really is in semantic terms that is being constrained here. Everyone agrees that it is not coreference in a literal sense, i.e., sameness of referents. But to specify in positive and semantically precise terms what it is instead has turned out to be non-trivial. Those authors that have given serious attention to the semantic import of syntactic constraints on so-called "coreference" have arrived at rather different conclusions.1 A particularly elegant and well-elaborated proposal in this regard is due to Tanya Reinhart (1983a; 1983b). I ts central thesis is that only one type of "coreference" relation is syntactically represented and directly constrained by principles of grammar, and this is the well-understood relation of variable binding in the sense of formal logic. Other semantic relations, in particular such as may obtain between two referring NPs, are not even represented on any syntactic level and can therefore not be directly licensed or ruled out by structural conditions. They are regulated instead by an extragrammatical principle which says, very roughly, that coreference is unavailable whenever the same meaning can be conveyed by means of variable binding. We will get to the details shortly. The purpose of this article is two-fold: First, I will develop a formulation of Reinhart's proposal that is in certain respects somewhat more explicit than her own. Second, I will argue for a revision which, though it does
Genetic Vaccines and Therapy

Background: Protein-calorie malnutrition (PCM) is the most common type of malnutrition. PCM leads to immunodeficiency and consequent increased susceptibility to infectious agents. In addition, responses to prophylactic vaccines depend on nutritional status. This study aims to evaluate the ability of undernourished mice to mount an immune response to a genetic vaccine (pVAXhsp65) against tuberculosis, containing the gene coding for the heat shock protein 65 from mycobacteria. Methods: Young adult female BALB/c mice were fed ad libitum or with 80% of the amount of food consumed by a normal diet group. We initially characterized a mice model of dietary restriction by determining body and spleen weights, hematological parameters and histopathological changes in lymphoid organs. The ability of splenic cells to produce IFN-gamma and IL-4 upon in vitro stimulation with LPS or S. aureus and the serum titer of specific IgG1 and IgG2a anti-hsp65 antibodies after intramuscular immunization with pVAXhsp65 was then tested. Results: Dietary restriction significantly decreased body and spleen weights and also the total lymphocyte count in blood. This restriction also determined a striking atrophy in lymphoid organs as spleen, thymus and lymphoid tissue associated with the small intestine. Specific antibodies were not detected in mice submitted to dietary restriction whereas the well nourished animals produced significant levels of both, IgG1 and IgG2a anti-hsp65. Conclusion: 20% restriction in food intake deeply compromised humoral immunity induced by a genetic vaccine, alerting, therefore, for the relevance of the nutritional condition in vaccination programs based on these kinds of constructs. Published: 16 July 2009 Genetic Vaccines and Therapy 2009, 7:11 doi:10.1186/1479-0556-7-11 Received: 5 May 2009 Accepted: 16 July 2009 This article is available from: http://www.gvt-journal.com/content/7/1/11 © 2009 Ishikawa et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Shape google: Geometric words and expressions for invariant shape retrieval

The computer vision and pattern recognition communities have recently witnessed a surge of feature-based methods in object recognition and image retrieval applications. These methods allow representing images as collections of “visual words” and treat them using text search approaches following the “bag of features” paradigm. In this article, we explore analogous approaches in the 3D world applied to the problem of nonrigid shape retrieval in large databases. Using multiscale diffusion heat kernels as “geometric words,” we construct compact and informative shape descriptors by means of the “bag of features” approach. We also show that considering pairs of “geometric words” (“geometric expressions”) allows creating spatially sensitive bags of features with better discriminative power. Finally, adopting metric learning approaches, we show that shapes can be efficiently represented as binary codes. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the SHREC 2010 large-scale shape retrieval benchmark.
Not Making the Grade: A Narrative Inquiry Into Timmy’s Experiences With the Mandated Curriculum

This research draws on the experiences of a Grade 1 delayed reader, his parents, and his teachers, to show his lived curriculum across his home and school contexts. This narrative inquiry is situated in the literature of curriculum studies, in the notions of the lived curriculum and curriculum-making. Field texts include field notes from the classrooms, transcripts of conversations with the child, his parents, and his teachers. For this paper, I illustrate the child’s experiences at the end of Grade 1, among the tensions created between the lived curriculum of a struggling reader, and the expectations of the mandated curriculum, which are shaped by institutional and sociocultural narratives. My goal is to provide insight into making curriculum in schools that accounts for the lived curricula of all children. Keywords: lived curriculum; narrative inquiry; curriculum-making
On the reaction of cells and of nerve‐endings to certain poisons, chiefly as regards the reaction of striated muscle to nicotine and to curari

IN a former paper' I showed that niicotine stimulates symnpathetic nerve cells by a direct action upon thetn, and I gave reasons for thinking that it does not stinmulate pre-ganglionic nierve-endings. I showed also that nicotine can paralyse nerve cells as regards stimulation by nicotine, but I pointed out that the cells might still be excitable by other stimuli and retain some of their functions. It had been shown in 1889 by Lewandowsky2 that supraienal extract had its usual stimulating action upon the iris, eye, and nictitating membrane three weeks after extirp;ition of the superior cervical ganglioll. In consequence, he considered that the extract acted on thie miuscle and not on the 'nerve-endings. This observation was confirmed by myself 9, and to the effects produced