Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A multi-layer network based on Sparse Ternary Codes for universal vector compression

We present the multi-layer extension of the Sparse Ternary Codes (STC) for fast similarity search where we focus on the reconstruction of the database vectors from the ternary codes. To consider the trade-offs between the compactness of the STC and the quality of the reconstructed vectors, we study the rate-distortion behavior of these codes under different setups. We show that a single-layer code cannot achieve satisfactory results at high rates. Therefore, we extend the concept of STC to multiple layers and design the ML-STC, a codebook-free system that successively refines the reconstruction of the residuals of previous layers. While the ML-STC keeps the sparse ternary structure of the single-layer STC and hence is suitable for fast similarity search in large-scale databases, we show its superior rate-distortion performance on both model-based synthetic data and public large-scale databases, as compared to several binary hashing methods.
Experimental Evaluation of Time Bounded Anti-Spoofing (TBAS) in MIMO Systems

We look into the challenges faced by TBAS on MIMO systems through extensive experimentation. We conduct experiments with off-the-shelf wireless cards and run real world tests to evaluate the robustness of TBAS on MIMO in typical Wi-Fi environments with different levels of channel mobility. Our results show that TBAS can be very accurate when running on 3 by 2 systems or above at packet separation of 3ms, even when the wireless node is moving at a fast speed. Based on the trend, it is expected that the performance can improve even further for higher MIMO configurations. We believe this paper can be used as a guideline for future systems that will incorporate TBAS.
Advances in Brief No Evidence of Peutz-Jeghers Syndrome Gene LKB 1 Involvement in Left-sided Colorectal Carcinomas 1

LKB1 serine/threonine kinase is a gene for Peutz-Jeghers cancer predisposition syndrome. Most studies have detected a low frequency of LKB1 defects in sporadic cancer. A notable exception is a recent report describing frequent, mostly missense type,LKB1 mutations in Korean distal colorectal tumors. To clarify the role of LKB1 in colon cancer, we scrutinized 50 left-sided Korean and Finnish specimens. No somatic mutations were found. The seven Korean somatic missense mutations reported previously were functionally analyzed, and five were found not to alter LKB1 kinase activity. One of these changes was found to be a germ-line polymorphism. LKB1 involvement in distal colorectal cancer is not common.
Wind‐wave‐induced velocity in ATI SAR ocean surface currents: First experimental evidence from an airborne campaign

Conventional and along-track interferometric (ATI) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sense the motion of the ocean surface by measuring the Doppler shift of reflected signals. Measurements are affected by a Wind-wave induced Artefact Surface Velocity (WASV) which was modelled theoretically in past studies and has been estimated empirically only once before with Envisat ASAR by Mouche et al., (2012). An airborne campaign in the tidally dominated Irish Sea served to evaluate this effect and the current retrieval capabilities of a dual-beam SAR interferometer known as Wavemill. A comprehensive collection of Wavemill airborne data acquired in a star pattern over a well-instrumented validation site made it possible for the first time to estimate the magnitude of the WASV, and its dependence on azimuth and incidence angle from data alone. In light wind (5.5 m/s) and moderate current (0.7 m/s) conditions, the wind-wave induced contribution to the measured ocean surface motion reaches up to 1.6 m/s upwind, with a well-defined 2nd order harmonic dependence on direction to the wind. The magnitude of the WASV is found to be larger at lower incidence angles. The airborne WASV results show excellent consistency with the empirical WASV estimated from Envisat ASAR. These results confirm that SAR and ATI surface velocity estimates are strongly affected by WASV and that the WASV can be well characterized with knowledge of the wind knowledge and of the geometry. These airborne results provide the first independent validation of Mouche et al., 2012, and confirm that the empirical model they propose provides the means to correct airborne and spaceborne SAR and ATI SAR data for WASV to obtain accurate ocean surface current measurements. After removing the WASV, the airborne Wavemill retrieved currents show very good agreement against ADCP measurements with a root mean square error (RMSE) typically around 0.1 m/s in velocity and 10° in direction. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Performance Estimation for Business Workflows on Public Cloud Offerings Using Probabilistic Model Checker

Because of the prevalence of public SaaS cloud offerings, such as e-mail and spreadsheet (document) services, many cloud users are beginning to construct their cloud business processes by cascading various cloud offerings as workflows that are executable on workflow engines, such as Fujitsu's Run My Process. Although utilizing existing cloud services when constructing business processes can reduce the time and costs required for development, it is difficult to estimate the availability and costs required for executing workflows with complex structures during the design stage. To solve this problem, we have developed a method to estimate the quantitative aspects of business workflows when using public SaaS cloud offerings. Using the probabilistic Markov decision process (MDP), we have constructed models that represent the behavior of workflow utilizing cloud offerings. Then, using the PRISM probabilistic model checker, we have calculated the models' performances. A case study shows that our approach can estimate the performance of a complex business workflow before it is executed.
Predictors of political orientation among US-born Mexican Americans: cultural identification, acculturation attitudes and socioeconomic status

With each passing election, U.S. political campaigns have renewed their efforts in courting the “Latino vote,” yet the Latino population is not a culturally homogenous voting bloc. This study examined how cultural identifications and acculturation attitudes in U.S. born Mexican Americans interacted with socioeconomic status (SES) to predict political orientation. Individuals who held stronger Mexican identity and supported biculturalism as an acculturation strategy had a more liberal orientation, while belonging to a higher SES group and holding stronger assimilation attitudes predicted a less liberal orientation. Mexican cultural identification interacted with SES such that those who held a weaker Mexican identity, but came from a higher social class were less liberal and more moderate in their political orientation. Weak Mexican identification and higher SES also predicted weaker endorsement of bicultural acculturation attitudes, which in turn, mediated the differences in political orientation. The acceptance of one’s ethnic identity and endorsement of bicultural attitudes predicted a more liberal political orientation. In light of these findings, political candidates should be cautious in how they pander to Latino constituents—referencing the groups’ ethnic culture or customs may distance constituents who are not strongly identified with their ethnic culture.
Quantifying the statistical distribution of Tropical Cyclone Activity in the historical record of the Dominican Republic

In this study, we re-examined the Official Hurricane Database from the National Hurricane Center (HURDAT-NHC), an agency associated with NOAA, for tropical cyclone activity from 1851 to 2012for the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Basin. We performed analyses at two different levels for the island (i.e., all of the storm tracks in the Caribbean Basin near to the study area that made landfall and all of the events that crossed the Dominican Republic from a radius of 300 km from the coastline). This study includes the statistical occurrence of these phenomena during the study period and the climatological analysis of all tropical cyclone tracks (112 total events) by decadal seasonal distribution, fifty - year seasonal distribution and monthly seasonal distribution to show the lowest and highest activities . We performed wavelet analysis on the continuous data over a long time series to determine the important frequencies. This analysis provided a general statistical conclusion resulting from the data collected. A landfall probability for the study area corresponding to the long time series of (it’s 162) years within a radius of ~100, ~185 and ~300 km, based on the historical climatology tropical cyclone tracks, reveals the likelihood of a strike for a major or a minor hurricane. We present a review of the tropical cyclone activities that passed the Dominican Republic, which also forms part of the author’s dissertation.
Alternating chemotherapy and accelerated split‐course irradiation in locally advanced nonsmall cell lung carcinoma

The prognosis of patients with locally advanced nonsmall cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC), which is usually unresectable, is very poor, and patient survival rarely reaches 1 year. However, prolonged survival correlated with objective responses has been observed among patients with intrathoracic disease treated with a combination of cytotoxic drugs and local irradiation despite the lack of consensus regarding the schedule of such combined therapy. From October 1989 to November 1993, a Phase II study was conducted to evaluate the tolerability and efficacy of alternating chemotherapy and accelerated split‐course radiotherapy in the treatment of patients with locally advanced NSCLC.
SYNOPSIS OF THE ODONATE FAUNA OF THE BISMAIlCK " ARCHIPELAGO AND THE SOLOMON ISLANDS

In the present small paper an attempt has been made to put on record all that is at present known of the Odonate fauna of Northern Melanesia 1), viz the Admiralty Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands. There is hardly another region in the entire world about which so little is known entomologically as these extensive island groups. With regard to the Odonata of the Solomon chains, which cover an area: 60n miles in length, I believe that these islands are the most neglected of the entire Pacific, and no doubt many interesting facts connected with their distribution remain to be brought to light. Very little is still known of the rough interior of the Bismarck Islands, which are almost entirely covered with primeval forests; the mountains on New Ireland attain a height of 2150 metres, while the highest recorded altitude on New Britain (Mt Ulawun) is about 2300 m. As to the topography of the Solomon Islands the reader is referred to the classical work of Guppy 2) and LEVER'S interesting accounts 3). It may suffice here to acknowledge the fact that much of the interior of the islands is still unmapped and even unknown to white men. The greatest height attained within the British Protectorate is almost 2450 metres on Guadalcanal, and on most islands there are extensive areas of over 1000 metres elevation. Kolombangara and San Cristoval for instance, rise to a height of 1780 and 1250 metres above sea-level (see also LEVER'S instructive maps, l. c.). In the politically distinct but geologically identical island of Bougainville, the summits of some of the snow-capped mountains in the interior attain an elevation of almost 320.0' metres.
Event-Related Potentials Associated with Somatosensory Effect in Audio-Visual Speech Perception

Speech perception often involves multisensory processing. Although previous studies have demonstrated visual [1, 2] and somatosensory interactions [3, 4] with auditory processing, it is not clear whether somatosensory information can contribute to the processing of audiovisual speech perception. This study explored the neural consequence of somatosensory interactions in audiovisual speech processing. We assessed whether somatosensory orofacial stimulation influenced event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to an audiovisual speech illusion (the McGurk Effect [1]). 64 scalp sites of ERPs were recorded in response to audiovisual speech stimulation and somatosensory stimulation. In the audiovisual condition, an auditory stimulus /ba/ was synchronized with the video of congruent facial motion (the production of /ba/) or incongruent facial motion (the production of the /da/: McGurk condition). These two audiovisual stimulations were randomly presented with and without somatosensory stimulation associated with facial skin deformation. We found ERPs differences associated with the McGurk effect in the presence of the somatosensory conditions. ERPs for the McGurk effect reliably diverge around 280 ms after auditory onset. The results demonstrate a change of cortical potential of audiovisual processing due to somatosensory inputs and suggest that somatosensory information encoding facial motion also influences speech processing.
Summary statistics from training images as prior information in probabilistic inversion

SUMMARY A strategy is presented to incorporate prior information from conceptual geological models in probabilistic inversion of geophysical data. The conceptual geological models are represented by multiple-point statistics training images (TIs) featuring the expected lithological units and structural patterns. Information from an ensemble of TI realizations is used in two different ways. First, dominant modes are identified by analysis of the frequency content in the realizations, which drastically reduces the model parameter space in the frequency-amplitude domain. Second, the distributions of global, summary metrics (e.g. model roughness) are used to formulate a prior probability density function. The inverse problem is formulated in a Bayesian framework and the posterior pdf is sampled using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. The usefulness and applicability of this method is demonstrated on two case studies in which synthetic crosshole ground-penetrating radar traveltime data are inverted to recover 2-D porosity fields. The use of prior information from TIs significantly enhances the reliability of the posterior models by removing inversion artefacts and improving individual parameter estimates. The proposed methodology reduces the ambiguity inherent in the inversion of high-dimensional parameter spaces, accommodates a wide range of summary statistics and geophysical forward problems.
Multiversioned decoupled access-execute: the key to energy-efficient compilation of general-purpose programs

Computer architecture design faces an era of great challenges in an attempt to simultaneously improve performance and energy efficiency. Previous hardware techniques for energy management become severely limited, and thus, compilers play an essential role in matching the software to the more restricted hardware capabilities. One promising approach is software decoupled access-execute (DAE), in which the compiler transforms the code into coarse-grain phases that are well-matched to the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) capabilities of the hardware. While this method is proved efficient for statically analyzable codes, general-purpose applications pose significant challenges due to pointer aliasing, complex control flow and unknown runtime events. We propose a universal compile-time method to decouple general-purpose applications, using simple but efficient heuristics. Our solutions overcome the challenges of complex code and show that automatic decoupled execution significantly reduces the energy expenditure of irregular or memory-bound applications and even yields slight performance boosts. Overall, our technique achieves over 20% on average energy-delay-product (EDP) improvements (energy over 15% and performance over 5%) across 14 benchmarks from SPEC CPU 2006 and Parboil benchmark suites, with peak EDP improvements surpassing 70%.
Video Scene Extraction Using Mosaic Technique

Scene extraction is the first step toward semantic understanding of the video. This paper presents an effective approach to video scene extraction based on the analysis of background images. Our approach exploits the fact that shots belonging to one particular scene often have similar background. Although part of the video frame is covered by foreground objects, background scene still can be reconstructed by mosaic technique. The proposed scene extraction algorithm consists of two main components: the determination of shot similarity measure and shot grouping process. In our approach, several low-level visual features are integrated to compute the similarity measure between two shots. On the other hand, high-level knowledge in cinematography is used to guide the shot grouping process. Experimental results show that our approach is promising and outperforms some existing technique
Skeleton network reconfiguration for system restoration in restructured power industry

Power system restoration is an important task for system operators. Due to the importance of the problem, the ways which will be used for solving it are significant as well. One of the best methods for restoring a power system is recognition and access to the network reconfiguration. If the main skeleton-network is recognized appropriately, other parts of the network can be restored at the shortest possible time. Restructuring in power industry add new complicated constraints to the problem of power system restoration. While this issue has been investigated by many researchers, little attention has been paid to this task in a market based environment. In most solving methods an index is defined to rank the network nodes. But none of the suggested indices have the comprehensiveness and also none of them considered the issues which have been dictated by the power market. This article represents a new combined index and market based method for ranking the network buses, which by applying it to different power systems; the best reconfigured network can be distinguished. Restoring other parts of the network from this skeleton network will lessen the restoration time. By using this index we can also decrease the cost of blackout and the cost of the power system restoration. This index in compare to similar indices has a better function and performs a better bus ranking for complicated power networks in market environment. Genetic algorithm is used to solve this problem. The suggested method is used to rank the buses of the IEEE 30-bus network. Results show that this method in compare with similar methods has a better performance
EnergyTrack: Sensor-Driven Energy Use Analysis System

Demand side management (DSM) has emerged as a promising way to balance the electrical grid's demand and supply in an economical and environmentally friendly manner. For successful DSM, it is crucial to automate the analysis of building energy usage with respect to important factors that drive it, such as occupancy. In this paper, we present a sensor-driven energy use analysis system, EnergyTrack, that continuously analyzes, evaluates, and interprets building energy use in real-time. We develop an energy usage model in EnergyTrack that simultaneously considers device-specific energy consumption, occupancy changes, and occupant utility. We also design a low-cost occupancy estimation algorithm with a lightweight training requirement. The EnergyTrack testbed is implemented in a commercial building office space. Through this testbed, we demonstrate the performance of our occupancy estimation algorithm and the application of EnergyTrack in energy use analysis.
Hereditary cerebellar degeneration in Scottish terriers.

BACKGROUND Hereditary cerebellar degeneration is described in several dog breeds. This heterogeneous group of diseases causes cerebellar ataxia associated with cerebellar cortical degeneration. OBJECTIVE To report the clinical and histopathological features, and describe the mode of inheritance of hereditary cerebellar degeneration in Scottish Terriers. ANIMALS Sixty-two affected dogs recruited through the Scottish Terrier Club of America. MATERIALS AND METHODS Prospective, observational study: Owners of affected dogs were contacted for a description of clinical signs, age of onset, and disease progression. Medical records, videotapes of gait, and brain imaging were evaluated. When possible, necropsy was performed and the brain examined histopathologically. Prevalence of the disease was estimated and a pedigree analysis was performed to determine mode of inheritance. RESULTS Gait abnormalities were noted in the 1st year of life in 76% of dogs, and progressed slowly; only 1 of 27 dogs dead at time of writing was euthanized because of cerebellar degeneration. Clinical signs included wide based stance, dysmetria, intention tremor, and difficulty negotiating stairs and running. Cerebellar atrophy was detected on magnetic resonance imaging. On histopathological examination, there was segmental loss of Purkinje neurons, thinning of molecular and granular layers, and polyglucosan bodies in the molecular layer. Prevalence of disease was estimated at 1 in 1,335 American Kennel Club registered Scottish Terriers. Genetic analysis results are consistent with an autosomal recessive mode of inheritance. CONCLUSION AND CLINICAL IMPORTANCE A hereditary cerebellar degenerative disorder with a relatively mild phenotype has emerged in the Scottish Terrier. Genetic studies are needed.
Effect of Carotid Endarterectomy or Stenting on Impairment of Dynamic Cerebral Autoregulation

Background and Purpose— Analysis of dynamic cerebral autoregulation (DCA) from spontaneous blood pressure fluctuations might contribute to prognosis of severe internal carotid artery stenosis, but its response to carotid recanalization has not been investigated so far. This study investigates the effect of carotid endarterectomy or stenting on various DCA parameters. Methods— In 58 patients with severe unilateral stenosis undergoing carotid endarterectomy (n=41) or stenting (n=17), cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV, transcranial Doppler) and arterial blood pressure (ABP, Finapres method) were recorded over 10 minutes before and on average 3 days after carotid recanalization. Nineteen patients were additionally examined after 7 months. Correlations between diastolic and mean ABP and CBFV fluctuations were averaged to form the correlation coefficient indices (diastolic [Dx] and mean values [Mx]). Transfer function parameters (low-frequency phase and high-frequency gain between ABP and CBFV oscillations) were calculated over the same 10 minutes. CO2 reactivity was assessed via inhalation of 7% CO2. Results— Before recanalization, all DCA parameters were clearly impaired ipsilaterally compared with contralateral sides. Phase, Dx, and Mx indicated early normalization of DCA after both endarterectomy and stenting. By multiple regression, the degree of DCA improvement was highly significantly related to the extent of impairment before recanalization. No significant change in DCA was found at follow-up. Ipsilateral gain and CO2 reactivity increased significantly less after endarterectomy than after stenting (P < 0.05). Conclusions— Dynamic cerebral dysautoregulation in patients with severe carotid obstruction is readily and completely remedied by carotid recanalization.
2 Localization on S D − p − 2 versus boundary conditions

Banks, Douglas, Horowitz and Martinec [1] recently argued that in the microcanonical ensemble for string theory on AdSm×S, there is a phase transition between a black hole solution extended over the Sn and a solution localized on the Sn. If we think of this AdSm×S geometry as arising from the near-horizon limit of a black m−2 brane, the existence of this phase transition is puzzling. We present a resolution of this puzzle, and discuss its significance from the point of view of the dual m−1 dimensional field theory. We also discuss multi-black hole solutions in AdS. peet@itp.ucsb.edu sross@cosmic.physics. ucsb.edu