Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TSV-driven 3D ICs: An innovative thermal-aware and stress-reliable design strategy

In this work, a 3-D IC architecture is proposed that composes an odd tier-number to provide enough flexibility to a circuit block at a specific tier to connect blocks at all other tiers. For a three-tier structure, it provides flexibility to a circuit block at the bottom or top layer in order to simultaneously connect blocks assigned to other layers. Such architecture would result in lower thermal dissipation and better mechanical strength. We developed a partitioning methodology to construct such a three-layered device structure from an input 2-D netlist. Experiments are conducted with Python using this methodology to show reduced effective area, number of TSVs and CPU execution times. Comparative results on TSV count are found to show improvement over prior techniques.
Muscarinic M2 Receptor Stimulation of Cav1.2b Requires Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinase, Protein Kinase C, and c-Src

Abstract— This study investigated regulation of L-type calcium channels (Cav1.2b) by acetylcholine (ACh) in rabbit portal vein myocytes. Whole-cell currents were recorded using 5 mmol/L barium as charge carrier. ACh (10 &mgr;mol/L) increased peak currents by 40%. This effect was not reversed by the selective muscarinic M3 receptor antagonist 4-DAMP (100 nmol/L) but was blocked by the M2 receptor antagonist methoctramine (5 &mgr;mol/L). The classical and novel protein kinase C (PKC) antagonist calphostin C (50 nmol/L) abolished ACh responses, whereas the classical PKC antagonist Gö6976 (200 nmol/L) had no effect. ACh responses were also abolished by the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitor LY294002 (20 &mgr;mol/L), by the c-Src inhibitor PP2 (10 &mgr;mol/L) (but not the inactive analogue PP3), and by dialyzing cells with an antibody to the G-protein subunit G&bgr;&ggr;. Cells dialyzed with c-Src had significantly greater currents than control cells. Current enhancement persisted in the presence of LY294002, suggesting that c-Src is downstream of PI3K. Phorbol 12,13-dibutyrate (PDBu, 0.1 &mgr;mol/L) increased currents by 74%. This effect was abolished by calphostin C and reduced by Gö6976. The PDBu response was also reduced by PP2, and the PP2-insensitive component was blocked by Gö6976. In summary, these data suggest that ACh enhances Cav1.2b currents via M2 receptors that couple sequentially to G&bgr;&ggr;, PI3K, a novel PKC, and c-Src. PDBu stimulates the novel PKC/c-Src pathway along with a second pathway that is independent of c-Src and involves a classical PKC.
Diastolic augmentation index improves augmentation index in assessing arterial stiffness

Arterial stiffness is an important risk factor for cardiovascular (CV) events and is increasingly used in clinical practice. Radial augmentation index (AI) is used in assessing arterial stiffness, but is not only dependent on pulse wave velocity (PWV), but also on several other factors like the reflect distance of pulse wave and height. This paper improved radial AI in assessing arterial stiffness by d-value, the subtraction between radial AI and diastolic AI (dAI). Nineteen subjects aged 18 to 80 years (mean±SD, 46±27 years) were enrolled in this study. Carotid-femoral PWV (cf-PWV), radial AI and dAI of each subject were measured. The d-value (r=0.69, P<0.005) shows better linearity with cf-PWV than AI (r=0.62, P<0.01) and dAI (not significant) do. In conclusion, dAI improves AI in assessing arterial stiffness.
METABOLIC REMODELING OF MALIGNANT GLIOMAS FOR ENHANCED SENSITIZATION DURING RADIOTHERAPY: AN IN VITRO STUDY

OBJECTIVETo investigate a novel method to enhance radiosensitivity of gliomas via modification of metabolite flux immediately before radiotherapy. Malignant gliomas are highly glycolytic and produce copious amounts of lactic acid, which is effluxed to the tumor microenvironment via lactate transporters. We hypothesized that inhibition of lactic acid efflux would alter glioma metabolite profiles, including those that are radioprotective. 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) was used to quantify key metabolites, including those most effective for induction of low-dose radiation-induced cell death. METHODSWe inhibited lactate transport in U87-MG gliomas with α-cyano-4-hydroxycinnamic acid (ACCA). Flow cytometry was used to assess induction of cell death in treated cells. Cells were analyzed by MRS after ACCA treatment. Control and treated cells were subjected to low-dose irradiation, and the surviving fractions of cells were determined by clonogenic assays. RESULTSMRS revealed changes to intracellular lactate on treatment with ACCA. Significant decreases in the metabolites taurine, glutamate, glutathione, alanine, and glycine were observed, along with inversion of the choline/phosphocholine profile. On exposure to low-dose radiation, ACCA-pretreated U-87MG cells underwent rapid morphological changes, which were followed by apoptotic cell death. CONCLUSIONInhibition of lactate efflux in malignant gliomas results in alterations of glycolytic metabolism, including decreased levels of the antioxidants taurine and glutathione and enhanced radiosensitivity of ACCA-treated cells. Thus, in situ application of lactate transport inhibitors such as ACCA as a novel adjunctive therapeutic strategy against glial tumors may greatly enhance the level of radiation-induced cell killing during a combined radio- and chemotherapeutic regimen.
Simulation and performance assessment of airport landing lighting

Airport landing lighting is used to guide aircraft to an airport for safe landing during day or night operations and in any type of weather. It is crucial therefore that the landing lighting performs according to the standards set out by the aviation industry. Researchers at Queen's University Belfast have developed a technique for assessing the performance of landing lighting luminaires whilst in service. However, because of the necessity to keep airport operations functioning as efficiently as possible, it is difficult to test and validate this system on a real landing lighting system. In this paper, we present a technique for testing this system by developing a virtual landing lighting pattern using a computer generated 3D model. This virtual lighting pattern can be used to test and validate the proposed assessment system and subsequently refine the technique before real field trials begin. In this paper we describe the development of the virtual model and compare its performance to an actual lighting pattern, and show that it is possible to accurately simulate lighting patterns. This work has relevance to a range of applications where lighting design and performance are important considerations.
Comparison of the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone diets for weight loss and heart disease risk reduction: a randomized trial.

CONTEXT The scarcity of data addressing the health effects of popular diets is an important public health concern, especially since patients and physicians are interested in using popular diets as individualized eating strategies for disease prevention. OBJECTIVE To assess adherence rates and the effectiveness of 4 popular diets (Atkins, Zone, Weight Watchers, and Ornish) for weight loss and cardiac risk factor reduction. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A single-center randomized trial at an academic medical center in Boston, Mass, of overweight or obese (body mass index: mean, 35; range, 27-42) adults aged 22 to 72 years with known hypertension, dyslipidemia, or fasting hyperglycemia. Participants were enrolled starting July 18, 2000, and randomized to 4 popular diet groups until January 24, 2002. INTERVENTION A total of 160 participants were randomly assigned to either Atkins (carbohydrate restriction, n=40), Zone (macronutrient balance, n=40), Weight Watchers (calorie restriction, n=40), or Ornish (fat restriction, n=40) diet groups. After 2 months of maximum effort, participants selected their own levels of dietary adherence. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES One-year changes in baseline weight and cardiac risk factors, and self-selected dietary adherence rates per self-report. RESULTS Assuming no change from baseline for participants who discontinued the study, mean (SD) weight loss at 1 year was 2.1 (4.8) kg for Atkins (21 [53%] of 40 participants completed, P = .009), 3.2 (6.0) kg for Zone (26 [65%] of 40 completed, P = .002), 3.0 (4.9) kg for Weight Watchers (26 [65%] of 40 completed, P < .001), and 3.3 (7.3) kg for Ornish (20 [50%] of 40 completed, P = .007). Greater effects were observed in study completers. Each diet significantly reduced the low-density lipoprotein/high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol ratio by approximately 10% (all P<.05), with no significant effects on blood pressure or glucose at 1 year. Amount of weight loss was associated with self-reported dietary adherence level (r = 0.60; P<.001) but not with diet type (r = 0.07; P = .40). For each diet, decreasing levels of total/HDL cholesterol, C-reactive protein, and insulin were significantly associated with weight loss (mean r = 0.36, 0.37, and 0.39, respectively) with no significant difference between diets (P = .48, P = .57, P = .31, respectively). CONCLUSIONS Each popular diet modestly reduced body weight and several cardiac risk factors at 1 year. Overall dietary adherence rates were low, although increased adherence was associated with greater weight loss and cardiac risk factor reductions for each diet group.
Robust Performance Analysis of Uncertain LTI Systems: Dual LMI Approach and Verifications for Exactness

This paper addresses robust performance analysis problems of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems affected by real parametric uncertainties. These problems, known also as a special class of structured singular value computation problems, are inherently intractable (NP-hard problems). As such intensive research effort has been made to obtain computationally tractable and less conservative analysis conditions, where linear matrix inequality (LMI) plays an important. Nevertheless, since LMI-based conditions are expected to be conservative in general, it is often the case that we cannot conclude anything if the LMI at hand turns out to be infeasible. This motivates us to consider the dual of the LMI and examine the structure of the dual solution. By pursuing this direction, in this paper, we provide rank conditions on the dual solution matrix under which we can conclude that the underlying robust performance is never attained. In particular, a set of uncertain parameters that violates the specified performance can be computed. These results come from block-moment matrix structure of the dual variable, which is consistent with the recent results on polynomial optimization. This particular structure enables us to make good use of simultaneous diagonalizability property of commuting diagonalizable matrices so that the sound rank conditions for the exactness verification can be obtained.
A HYBRID ALGORITHM FOR OPTIMISING FACILITY LAYOUT

Despite the reported effectiveness of analytical algorithms in facility layout planning, a detailed literature survey suggests a lack of new analytical methods in recent years. This paper focuses on open space facilities layout planning that involves modules with constant aspect ratios. We propose a construction-cum-improvement algorithm involving a novel combination of a boundary search-based heuristic placement and steepest descent-based analytical improvement. In the construction phase, the algorithm places a new module at the optimal location on the boundary of a previously constructed cluster of modules. In the improvement phase, the algorithm alternates between boundary search and steepest descent moves until it converges to a local optimum. Experiments with well-known test problems indicate that the proposed algorithm produced solutions superior both to published results and to those produced by VIP-PLANOPT, a popular, oft-cited and commercially available layout planning and optimisation software.
Under new management: changing conceptions of teacher professionalism and policy in the further education sector

This paper examines the impact of recent changes in the structure and funding of Further Education following the 1992 Further and Higher Education (FHE) Act, on conditions of academic work for lecturers in the sector. In doing so it contributes to a debate on FE lecturers' work and professionalism in the managerial state (Clarke and Newman 1997) that has largely centred on schools. The paper assesses the impact of the shifting policy framework on FE lecturers' working practices and their identities at the local level by drawing on preliminary analysis of data from an ongoing ESRC funded research project, Changing Teaching and Managerial Cultures in FE (CTMC), undertaken at Keele. It outlines three different lecturer responses to changing conditions of work in FE; these are resistance, compliance and strategic compliance. The narratives presented in the paper suggest that changes are occurring in terms of what counts as being a ‘good lecturer’ in FE, through mediation of managerialist discourses that empha.
EMOTIONS AND RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS: A SOCIAL NETWORK APPROACH

This dissertation contributes to the scientific fie lds of Recommender Systems and Social Network Analysis, but also to Social-psychological studies applied to Digital Media Systems. Digital media entrepreneurs are using data from social networks to personalize Web-based services (e.g., searching and recommendat io ) to engage their publics in more effective and striking ways. However, this pra ctice is narrowing the diversity of viewpoints in the Web community because of the lack of access to novelty. I claim that the use of the current type of social data, based o n relationships set by endogenous effects (i.e., homophily) and friendship or social proximity (i.e., strong ties) creates a Social Echo Chamber Effect that traps people inside ocial bubbles of information. Consequently, instead of innovation, there is a red uction of quality in the services provided by recommender systems, and so, a lower le v l of user’s satisfaction. Acknowledging the drawbacks using data from social networks, but also its richness, this work proposes to find a solution to construct a flow of information and recommendations based on novelty through social dat a. Three empirical studies supported by an interdisciplinary approach between Social Network Analysis, Psychology and Neuroscience, examine which structur al factors and personal attributes contribute to novelty perception. These studies con sider in tandem the study of social ties and similarities among a population of student s and the emotional response to content selection in a social network, in particula r, surprise. The first study, which proposes an alternative method of investigating net work bridges and focuses on novelty perception from receivers, supports the hypothesis that surprise is a proxy of novelty and, thus, bridging factors, i.e., tie strength and structural holes, can be predictors of
The pre-exposure technique: Enhancing the effects of errorless learning in the acquisition of face–name associations

In an earlier paper (Downes et al., 1997), we demonstrated how the beneficial effects of imagery in a face-name association learning task could be enhanced further by the simple expedient of pre-exposing faces for a brief period prior to the introduction of the names to be associated. The present study examines whether the technique of errorless learning, recently applied in neuropsychological rehabilitation, might also benefit from pre-exposure. The rationale for hypothesising such an interaction follows from the speculation raised in our earlier work that the two techniques may be operating at different stages of learning—pre-exposure at registration/consolidation stages and errorless learning at retrieval. Accordingly, a group of brain-injured memory-impaired subjects was given four sets of face-name associations to learn under different experimental conditions. Two of these conditions compared errorless and errorful conditions, and two combined errorless learning with different versions of the pre-exposure technique. The results confirm that, in terms of the number of names learned on the first trial and the number of trials to criterion, errorless learning was significantly superior to errorful learning. Furthermore, both preexposure conditions in combination with errorless learning resulted in a significant enhancement of learning compared to errorless learning alone. Thus, as with imagery, although significant gains in performance are evident when errorless learning is used, further enhancement can be achieved by combining it with preexposure.
Intracellular routing of wild-type and mutated polymeric immunoglobulin receptor in hippocampal neurons in culture

Certain epithelial cells synthesize the polymeric immunoglobulin receptor (pIgR) to transport immunoglobulins (Igs) A and M into external secretions. In polarized epithelia, newly synthesized receptor is first delivered to the basolateral plasma membrane and is then, after binding the Ig, transcytosed to the apical plasma membrane, where the receptor-ligand complex is released by proteolytic cleavage. In a previous work (Ikonen et al., 1993), we implied the existence of a dendro-axonal transcytotic pathway for the rabbit pIgR expressed in hippocampal neurons via the Semliki Forest Virus (SFV) expression system. By labeling surface-exposed pIgR in live neuronal cells, we now show (a) internalization of the receptor from the dendritic plasma membrane to the dendritic early endosomes, (b) redistribution of the receptor from the dendritic to the axonal domain, (c) inhibition of this movement by brefeldin A (BFA) and (d) stimulation by the activation of protein kinase C (PKC) via phorbol myristate acetate (PMA). In addition, we show that a mutant form of the receptor lacking the epithelial basolateral sorting signal is directly delivered to the axonal domain of hippocampal neurons. Although this mutant is internalized into early endosomes, no transcytosis to the dendrites could be observed. In epithelial Madin-Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) cells, the mutant receptor could also be internalized into basolaterally derived early endosomes. These results suggest the existence of a dendro-axonal transcytotic pathway in neuronal cells which shares similarities with the basolateral to apical transcytosis in epithelial cells and constitute the basis for the future analysis of its physiological role.
An Efficient Approach for Mining Frequent Patterns Based on Traversing a Frequent Pattern Tree

Mining frequent patterns is an important task for knowledge discovery, which discovers the groups of items appearing always together excess of a user specified threshold. A famous algorithm for mining frequent patterns is FP-Growth which constructs a structure called FP-tree and recursively mines frequent patterns from this structure by building conditional FP-trees. However, It is costly to recursively construct conditional FP-trees. In order to decrease the usage of memory space and speed up the mining process, we propose an efficient approach for mining frequent patterns. Our approach only needs to construct a FP-tree and traverse each subtree of the FP-tree to generate all the frequent patterns for an item without constructing any other subtrees. Since there is no extra trees constructed and only a subtree needs to be traversed to generate frequent patterns for an item, our approach is much more efficient than FP-Growth algorithm. The experimental results also show that our approach significantly outperforms FP-Growth algorithm.
Data Persistency for Fault-Tolerance Using MPI Semantics

—As the size and complexity of high-performance computing hardware, as well as applications increase, the likelihood of a hardware failure during the execution time of large distributed applications is no longer negligible. On the other hand, frequent checkpointing of full application state or even full compute node memory is prohibitively expensive. Thus, application-level check-pointing of only indispensable data and application state is the only viable option to increase an application’s resiliency against faults. Existing application-level checkpointing approaches, however, require the user to learn new programming interfaces, etc. In this paper we present an approach to persist data and application state, as for instance messages transfered between compute nodes, which is seamlessly integrated into Message Passing Interface, i.e., the de-facto standard for distributed parallel computing in high-performance computing. The basic idea consists in allowing the user to mark a given communicator as having special, i.e., persistent, meaning. All communication through this persistent communicator is stored transparently by the system and available for application restart even after a failure. The concept is demonstrated by prototypical implementation of the proposed interface.
Object based 3-D motion and structure estimation

Motion analysis is the most crucial part of object-based coding. Motion in a 3-D environment can be analyzed better by using a 3-D motion model compared to its 2-D counterpart and hence may improve coding efficiency. Gibbs formulated joint segmentation and estimation of 2-D motion not only improves the performance, but also generates robust point correspondences which are necessary for linear 3-D motion estimation algorithms. Estimated 3-D motion parameters are used to find the structure of the previously segmented objects by minimizing another Gibbs energy. Such an approach achieves error immunity compared to linear algorithms. Experimental results are promising and hence the proposed motion and structure analysis method is a candidate to be used in object-based (or even knowledge-based) video coding schemes.
Conjunctive Bayesian networks

Conjunctive Bayesian networks (CBNs) are graphical models that describe the accumulation of events which are constrained in the order of their occurrence. A CBN is given by a partial order on a (finite) set of events. CBNs generalize the oncogenetic tree models of Desper et al. by allowing the occurrence of an event to depend on more than one predecessor event. The present paper studies the statistical and algebraic properties of CBNs. We determine the maximum likelihood parameters and present a combinatorial solution to the model selection problem. Our method performs well on two datasets where the events are HIV mutations associated with drug resistance. Concluding with a study of the algebraic properties of CBNs, we show that CBNs are toric varieties after a coordinate transformation and that their ideals possess a quadratic Grobner basis.