Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safe and Structured Use of Interrupts in Real-Time and Embedded Software

While developing embedded and real-time systems, it is usually necessary to write code that handles interrupts, or code the interacts with interrupt handlers. Interrupts are indispensable because they use hardware support to reduce both the latency and overhead of event detection, when compared to polling. Furthermore, modern embedded processor cores can save energy by shutting down when idle, leaving only simple circuitry such as timers running. For example, a TelosB [13] sensor network node drains a pair of AA batteries in a few days by running the processor continuously, but can run a useful application for months if the duty cycle is kept appropriately low. Interrupts have some inherent drawbacks from a software engineering point of view. First, they are relatively non-portable across compilers and hardware platforms. Second, they lend themselves to a variety of severe software errors that are difficult to track down since they manifest only rarely. These problems give interrupts a bad reputation for leading to flaky software: a significant problem where the software is part of a highly-available or safety-critical system. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a technical introduction to interrupts and the problems that their use can introduce into an embedded system, and also to provide a set of design rules for developers of interrupt-driven software. This chapter does not address interrupts on shared-memory multiprocessors, nor does it delve deeply into concurrency correctness: the avoidance of race conditions and deadlocks. Concurrency correctness is the subject of a large body of literature. Although the vast majority of this literature addresses problems in creating correct thread-based systems, essentially all of it also applies to interrupt-driven systems.
Plasma applications in medicine with a special focus on dermatology

The recent tremendous progress in understanding physical plasma phenomenon, together with the development of new plasma sources has put growing focus on the application of plasmas in health care. Active plasma components, such as molecules, atoms, ions, electrons and photons, reactive species, ultraviolet radiation, optical and infrared emission and heat have the ability of activating, controlling and catalysing reactions and complex biochemical procedures. Thermal and non‐thermal (i.e. cold) plasmas – both already widely established in medicine – are used for various therapeutic applications. Particularly in dermatology, plasma applications hold big potential, for example, in wound healing, such as efficient disinfection or sterilization, therapy of various skin infections or tissue regeneration. This review gives an overview on potential plasma applications in medicine – including the recent research on skin diseases – and summarizes possible interactions between plasmas and living tissue.
Trends in the gender wage gap and gender discrimination among part-time and full-time workers in post-apartheid South Africa

Using nationally representative household survey data from 1995 to 2006, this paper explores the gender wage gap among part-time and full-time salaried workers in post-apartheid South Africa, considering specifically how the magnitude of the gender-wage gap and the factors contributing to this gap have changed over time. The results, which are robust to the imputation of values for missing earnings information, provide evidence of a gender gap in wages among both part-time and full-time workers that persists once measurable differences between men and women are accounted for. In addition, the magnitude of the total gender wage differential for both groups has fallen over the years, with the greatest reduction visible for those working part-time. This finding is potentially explained by a decline in discrimination that is greater among part-time workers than among those working full-time, and which is evident even when domestic workers, who are likely to have benefited from the extension of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act to the domestic services sector in 2002, are excluded from the analysis. The inability to control for sample selection bias does, however, complicate the interpretation of the results.
Data Management for Internet of Things

Internet of Things is projected to connect uniquely identifiable devices over the network to build an interactive system with high velocity and volume of data placing forth a challenge of interoperability between such devices. RDF provides a common standard for communication among devices of network and supports powerful data inference. The paper addresses the challenge of handling huge sensor data interactively using RDF. The experiment includes various RDF storage mechanisms such as triple store, property table, vertically and horizontally partitioned table, column store, and data aware hybrid storage. It also shows comparison between vertical partitioning approach and data aware hybrid storage approach for faster data retrieval in IOT systems. The experiment shows 12% of performance improvement using hybrid approach over vertical partitioning approach. It also represents a set of metrics which have been designed to take decision for using appropriate RDF data storage technique beforehand for IOT systems.
H∞ control for network control systems with stochastic sampling

This paper investigates the H∞ control problem for the networked control systems with stochastic sampling. The network topology structure is CAN network owing to the fact that network-induced delay is always less than a sampling period and event driven is supported in CAN network. The continuous-time model with a variable satisfying a Bernoulli distribution is established for network control systems with stochastic sampling by employing the input-delay approach. Based on this, sufficient conditions are obtained, which guarantee the mean-square exponential stability of the system with an H∞ performance. Moreover, an H∞ controller design procedure is proposed. The simulation shows the validity of the control strategy and less conservatism.
Factors affecting the intention to use blog by students at secondary and tertiary educations

This study aimed to investigate factors affecting the intention to use blog and ease of it’s use at secondary and tertiary educations. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by Davis (1989) has been adopted in designing the theoretical framework for the study. This framework is applied to examine the significant differences between level of study related to factors affecting the intention to use blog namely the academic benefits, the social benefits, and ease of its use. One hundred students completed the survey questionnaire and responses to the 24 items were analysed. The results suggest that only one factor ( the academic benefits) was found to have a significant influence on the intention to use blog. In addition it was also found that there is a significant difference between perceived academic benefits of blogging at school and university levels of education.
On Making Generalized Paxos Practical

Generalized Paxos (GPaxos) is a recent solution to Generalized Consensus, a distributed problem to which several key agreement problems reduce. We envision that GPaxos may unify within a single and novel Agreement-as-a-Service infrastructure to multiple distributed protocols. To date this potential is however not fully unleashed, due to the steep learning curve of the protocol and the high complexity of its implementation. Moreover, before GPaxos reaches a real world usage, several computationally expensive operations have to be optimized and simplified. This paper aims at closing this gap between theory and practice. To this end, we first provide a concise tour of Generalized Paxos, hardly found elsewhere. Then, we assess the versatility of the Generalized Consensus problem by presenting a variation of GPaxos that solves the lease coordination problem. Our last contribution consists in three optimizations that apply to the critical phases of the algorithm: (i) a method to quickly start a new round, (ii) a novel approach to execute a checkpoint, and (iii) a data structure that speeds-up the detection of an agreement.
Association Between Loss of Dp140 and Cognitive Impairment in Duchenne and Becker Dystrophies

Abstract The presence of variable degrees of non progressive cognitive impairment is recognized as a clinical feature of patients with Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies (DMD and BMD), but its pathogenesis still remains a matter of debate. A number of findings have proved that rearrangements located in the second part of the dystrophin (DMD) gene seem to be preferentially associated with cognitive impairment. Dp140 is a distal dystrophin isoform, mainly expressed during fetal brain development, whose role for neuropsychological functioning was suggested. The aims of the current study were to explore the possible association between cognitive impairment and DNA mutations affecting the regulatory regions of Dp140, as well as to compare the neuropsychological functioning of patients affected with DMD and Intermediate muscular dystrophy (IMD) with those affected by Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD). Fiftythree patients genetically diagnosed with DMD, IMD and BMD, subdivided according to sites of mutations along the DMD gene, underwent a neuropsychological assessment, evaluating their general cognitive abilities, verbal memory, attention and executive functions. Twenty patients with mutations, terminating in exon 44 or starting at exon 45 were tested by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of microsatellites STR44, SK12, SK21 and P20 DXS269, in order to evaluate the integrity of the Dp140 promoter region. According to our statistical results, there was not a significant difference in terms of general intelligence between the allelic forms of the disease, a higher frequency of mental retardation was observed in DMD patients. The patients with BMD had better results on tests, measuring long-term verbal learning memory and executive functions. We found that patients lacking Dp140 performed more poorly on all neuropsychological tests compared to those with preserved Dp140. Overall, our findings suggest that the loss of Dp140 is associated with a higher risk of intellectual impairment among patients with dystrophinopathies and highlights the possible role of this distal isoform in normal cognitive development.
Measuring Cluster Similarity across Methods

Cluster analysis techniques delineate groupings or categories of observations based on some shared commonality over a set of variables. If such groupings can be formed, their commonality may be investigated to define relationships that may otherwise go undetected given their complexity. However, the cluster analyses are inappropriate unless the results can be replicated. A number of clustering techniques are available, differing mostly in the technical criteria used to judge the similarity of the observations. There is added validity to the cluster structure when different methods produce similar groupings however, in most cases, different clustering techniques will not produce identical clusters and the extent of cluster similarity becomes an important measure. In this paper the hypergeometric distribution is used to gauge cluster similarity across different methods, providing an appropriate measure of consistency. This measure is used to validate reproducibility of the clusters.
Clinical inertia of discharge planning among patients with poorly controlled diabetes mellitus.

OBJECTIVE We examined the effect of hospital admissions on the medical treatment of poorly controlled diabetes mellitus among Veterans Affairs (VA) patients. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This retrospective cohort study included male patients admitted to one of three VA hospitals from July 1, 2002, to August 31, 2009, who were receiving medication therapy for diabetes with hemoglobin A1c (HgbA1c) greater than 8.0%. The primary outcome was a change in preadmission and outpatient prescriptions for diabetes at hospital discharge. Covariates for multivariable logistic regression analysis of the primary outcome were defined a priori and retrieved from the electronic health record. RESULTS Of 2025 admissions for 1359 patients, 454 had some change in diabetes medications at discharge (rate of change 22.4%). In an adjusted analysis, higher preadmission HgbA1c [odds ratio (OR) 1.12 per 1.0 U increase; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.12-1.05; P < 0.001], higher mean blood glucose during admission (OR 1.07 per 10 mg/dl increase; 95% CI 1.05-1.10; P < 0.0001), occurrence of inpatient hypoglycemia (blood glucose < 50 mg/dl; OR 1.82, 95% CI 1.32-2.51, P < 0.001), and inpatient basal insulin therapy (OR 1.71; 95% CI 1.25-2.35; P < 0.001) were associated with higher odds of change in therapy. A total of 656 admissions (32%) demonstrated aggregate clinical inertia with no change in therapy, no documentation of HgbA1c within 60 d of discharge, and no follow-up appointment within 30 d of discharge. CONCLUSIONS In this multicenter, retrospective study of patients with poorly controlled diabetes and at least one hospitalization, less than a quarter received a change in outpatient diabetes therapy upon discharge, suggesting widespread clinical inertia. Nearly one third had no change in therapy or subsequent follow-up scheduled.
An Overview of Transliteration Second Exam Literature Review

Transliteration is a set of cross-language conversion tasks widely used in many areas of natural language processing. Well known examples of transliteration tasks include letterto-phoneme conversion, entity linking, and out-of-vocabulary words transliteration in endto-end translation system. With this popularity, this review aims to provide a general overview of transliteration models proposed in recent years, in order to provide a better understanding of these crosslanguage conversion tasks. On the perspective of mapping components of a source string to a target string, we focus on generative transliteration approaches here, and make a comparison on the effectiveness of them. Professor: Dr. Liang Huang Professor: Dr. Andrew Rosenberg Professor: Dr. Changhe Yuan Executive Officer: Dr. Robert Haralick Advisor: Dr. Liang Huang
Magnetic Field Analysis of Multi-Flux-Barrier Interior Permanent-Magnet Motors Through Conformal Mapping

An extended analytical method for predicting the open-circuit air-gap field distribution in interior permanent magnet (IPM) machines equipped with multilayer Permanent Magnets (PMs) is proposed in this paper. This presented method is based on the conformal mapping technique. The mapping is used to calculate the relative permeances, which consider the effect of stator slots and rotor saliency on the magnetic field distribution. The open-circuit air-gap field distribution in a multi-flux-barrier IPM can be predicted through the superposition principle. The analytical solution is implemented on: an eight-pole, 50 kW IPM motor used in 2004 Toyota Prius hybrid electric vehicle and four IPMs with two, three, four, and five flux barriers per pole. To verify this extended method, the results are compared with those obtained from the finite-element analysis.
IL-4 Engagement of the Type I IL-4 Receptor Complex Enhances Mouse Eosinophil Migration to Eotaxin-1 In Vitro

Background Previous work from our laboratory demonstrated that IL-4Rα expression on a myeloid cell type was responsible for enhancement of Th2-driven eosinophilic inflammation in a mouse model of allergic lung inflammation. Subsequently, we have shown that IL-4 signaling through type I IL-4 receptors on monocytes/macrophages strongly induced activation of the IRS-2 pathway and a subset of genes characteristic of alternatively activated macrophages. The direct effect(s) of IL-4 and IL-13 on mouse eosinophils are not clear. The goal of this study was determine the effect of IL-4 and IL-13 on mouse eosinophil function. Methods Standard Transwell chemotaxis assay was used to assay migration of mouse eosinophils and signal transduction was assessed by Western blotting. Results Here we determined that (i) mouse eosinophils express both type I and type II IL-4 receptors, (ii) in contrast to human eosinophils, mouse eosinophils do not chemotax to IL-4 or IL-13 although (iii) pre-treatment with IL-4 but not IL-13 enhanced migration to eotaxin-1. This IL-4-mediated enhancement was dependent on type I IL-4 receptor expression: γC-deficient eosinophils did not show enhancement of migratory capacity when pre-treated with IL-4. In addition, mouse eosinophils responded to IL-4 with the robust tyrosine phosphorylation of STAT6 and IRS-2, while IL-13-induced responses were considerably weaker. Conclusions The presence of IL-4 in combination with eotaxin-1 in the allergic inflammatory milieu could potentiate infiltration of eosinophils into the lungs. Therapies that block IL-4 and chemokine receptors on eosinophils might be more effective clinically in reducing eosinophilic lung inflammation.
Annexin A2 Regulates TRPA1-Dependent Nociception

The transient receptor potential A1 (TRPA1) channel is essential for vertebrate pain. Even though TRPA1 activation by ligands has been studied extensively, the molecular machinery regulating TRPA1 is only poorly understood. Using an unbiased proteomics-based approach we uncovered the physical association of Annexin A2 (AnxA2) with native TRPA1 in mouse sensory neurons. AnxA2 is enriched in a subpopulation of sensory neurons and coexpressed with TRPA1. Furthermore, we observe an increase of TRPA1 membrane levels in cultured sensory neurons from AnxA2-deficient mice. This is reflected by our calcium imaging experiments revealing higher responsiveness upon TRPA1 activation in AnxA2-deficient neurons. In vivo these findings are associated with enhanced nocifensive behaviors specifically in TRPA1-dependent paradigms of acute and inflammatory pain, while heat and mechanical sensitivity as well as TRPV1-mediated pain are preserved in AnxA2-deficient mice. Our results support a model whereby AnxA2 limits the availability of TRPA1 channels to regulate nociceptive signaling in vertebrates.
Increasing global agricultural production by reducing ozone damages via methane emission controls and ozone-resistant cultivar selection

Meeting the projected 50% increase in global grain demand by 2030 without further environmental degradation poses a major challenge for agricultural production. Because surface ozone (O3) has a significant negative impact on crop yields, one way to increase future production is to reduce O3‐induced agricultural losses. We present two strategies whereby O3 damage to crops may be reduced. We first examine the potential benefits of an O3 mitigation strategy motivated by climate change goals: gradual emission reductions of methane (CH4), an important greenhouse gas and tropospheric O3 precursor that has not yet been targeted for O3 pollution abatement. Our second strategy focuses on adapting crops to O3 exposure by selecting cultivars with demonstrated O3 resistance. We find that the CH4 reductions considered would increase global production of soybean, maize, and wheat by 23–102 Mt in 2030 – the equivalent of a ~2–8% increase in year 2000 production worth $3.5–15 billion worldwide (USD2000), increasing the cost effectiveness of this CH4 mitigation policy. Choosing crop varieties with O3 resistance (relative to median‐sensitivity cultivars) could improve global agricultural production in 2030 by over 140 Mt, the equivalent of a 12% increase in 2000 production worth ~$22 billion. Benefits are dominated by improvements for wheat in South Asia, where O3‐induced crop losses would otherwise be severe. Combining the two strategies generates benefits that are less than fully additive, given the nature of O3 effects on crops. Our results demonstrate the significant potential to sustainably improve global agricultural production by decreasing O3‐induced reductions in crop yields.
Impaired Glucose Priming of Insulin Secretion from Perfused Pancreas in Aged Female Rats

Abstract Effects of age and glucose levels on insulin secretion and synthesis were studied in the perfused pancreas of young (2-month-old) and older (10-month-old) female Wistar rats. Insulin secretion induced by 16.7 mM glucose showed a triphasic pattern: an early spike and fall (first phase, 0–6 min), followed by a sustained gradual increase (second phase, 7–120 min) and a gradual decreased release thereafter (third phase, 121–360 min) during the perfusion period of 360 min. First and second phase insulin secretion, but not third phase, were lower in older rats than in young rats. Insulin synthesis in old rat pancreas perfused with 16.7 nM glucose for 360 min was much greater than that of young rats. Second phase insulin secretion was restored to comparable levels by 28 mM glucose in older rats. Repeated pulses of 28 mM glucose potentiated subsequent insulin secretion in young rats, but not in older rats. These findings provide further evidence that sensitivity to glucose in pancreatic B cells is altered by aging.
Každodenní život, denní mobilita a adaptační strategie obyvatel v periferních lokalitách*

The availability of labour, education, services and transportation signifi cantly infl uences the quality of life in urban and rural areas. The sup- ply of job opportunities and services is not suffi cient in rural and peripheral villages and particularly young and well-educated people often respond by migrating. The people who remain cope with the problems of accessibility by various commuting methods. However, the poor supply of jobs and social in- frastructure may be a source of considerable problems for less mobile people trying to satisfy basic needs. This article employs in-depth case study research to evaluate the daily mobility of people in peripheral municipalities in West- ern Bohemia. It aims to identify the problems and barriers in the everyday life of the local population and to identify forms of daily mobility related to work and service provision. It evaluates how the lack of job opportunities and basic civic amenities infl uences the everyday strategies that people adopt to cope with the spatial mismatch between the place of residence and the place where jobs and services are located. The daily mobility and strategies of people liv- ing in municipalities are set in the context of post-communist changes in com- muting behaviour. Theoretically and methodologically the article draws on the strong tradition of time geography.
Building a LCS-Based Lexicon in TAGs*

We are interested in building a lexicon for interlingual machine translation (MT) and in examining the formal properties of an interlingua as a language in its own right. As such it should be possible to define a lexicalized grammar for the representation of lexical entries and a set of operations over that grammar that can be used to both analyze and generate interlingua representations. The interlingua we discuss in this paper is Le. ,dcal Conceptual Structure (LCS) as formulated by Dorr (1993) based on work by Jackendoff (1983, 1990). This is described in the next section, and is followed by the presentation of a grammar for LCS as a representation language. The grammar formalism whose operations we examine with respect to their ability to compose LCS representations is Feature-Based Lexicalized Adjoining Grammar, (FB-LTAG), a version of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) (Joshi et al (1975), Schabes (1990), Vijay-Shanker (1987)), and its description, along with example TAG structures, forms our final section. What we find is that the implementation of LCS as a TAG, although not completely straightforward, can be done, providing the full power of the well-defined mathematical properties of TAGs as a basis for describing the formal properties of LCS.