Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structural Analysis of Stiffened FGM Thick Walled Cylinders by Application of a New Cylindrical Super Element

cylinders. Abstract—Structural behavior of ring stiffened thick walled cylinders made of functionally graded materials (FGMs) is investigated in this paper. Functionally graded materials are inhomogeneous composites which are usually made from a mixture of metal and ceramic. The gradient compositional variation of the constituents from one surface to the other provides an elegant solution to the problem of high transverse shear stresses that are induced when two dissimilar materials with large differences in material properties are bonded. FGM formation of the cylinder is modeled by power-law exponent and the variation of characteristics is supposed to be in radial direction. A finite element formulation is derived for the analysis. According to the property variation of the constituent materials in the radial direction of the wall, it is not convenient to use conventional elements to model and analyze the structure of the stiffened FGM cylinders. In this paper a new cylindrical super-element is used to model the finite element formulation and analyze the static and modal behavior of stiffened FGM thick walled cylinders. By using this super-element the number of elements, which are needed for modeling, will reduce significantly and the process time is less in comparison with conventional finite element formulations. Results for static and modal analysis are evaluated and verified by comparison to finite element formulation with conventional elements. Comparison indicates a good conformity between results.
Statins, immunomodulation, and infections: a complex and unresolved relationship.

estimating that 20 000 cases of herpes zoster per year in the United States could be attributable to the use of statins. However, before one accepts the findings and recommendations, it is important to evaluate strengths and limitations of the study, as well as the underlying biological rationale. The strengths of the study include the use of a well-characterized database that has been widely employed for pharmacoepidemiologystudies;thecarefuldesign with adequate numbers of subjects who were exposed to statins and subsequent events; and the use of propensity analysis, a balancing score to ensure that the cases and controls are well matched at baseline [3], to reduce the risk of confounding. However, in any observational study, there is a residual risk of unforeseen confounding, particularly when the risk is as low as 13% above baseline. Some limitations of the study include the inability to define a dose-response relationship as most patients did not have a change in dose, and the use of statins as a class, as the individual compounds vary widely in their physical properties and pharmacokinetics and thus may have differential effects.
Proving Program Termination in Higher Order Logic

We suggest two simple additions to packages that use wellfounded recursion to justify termination of recursive programs: * The contraction condition, to be proved in cases when termination conditions are difficult or impossible to extract automatically; * user-supplied inductive invariants in cases of nested recursion. We have implemented these additions in Isabelle/HOL and demonstrated their usefulness on a large example of the recursive BDD algorithm Apply. The paper uses a simple predicate on functionals in higher order logic as an approximate model of program termination. We explore this model and prove that for every functional there exists a largest ``domain of termination''''.
Quasi-experimental evidence on the effect of traffic externalities on housing prices

This paper studies the effects on house prices of traffic nuisance on local streets. As source of exogenous variation in traffic nuisance we use the opening of a new state highway N14 in the Netherlands. This transport innovation altered the traffic density on the adjacent streets for some households, but left others unaffected. Controlling for spatial and house heterogeneity, we find that doubling of traffic density reduces housing prices with about 2%, what implies an upper value of traffic noise discount of about 0.5% per decibel. Our results indicate further that traffic nuisance discounts are likely to be misestimated in cross-sectional studies because nuisance tends to be correlated with omitted neighbourhood and housing amenities.
Incremental and iterative reengineering towards Software Product Line: An industrial case study

It is common in practice that a Software Product Line (SPL) is constructed by reengineering a set of existing variant products. To alleviate the problems of high risks of failures and the limitations of resources and cost, incremental reengineering towards a SPL is a natural choice in many cases. However, several problems remain unaddressed properly, such as how to define increments, how to satisfy regular product delivery in parallel with reengineering, and how to achieve early successes. In this paper, we report an industrial case study on a successful SPL-targeted reengineering project conducted in Alcatel-Lucent. In this project, the project team applied the principles of agile development in the process of SPL reengineering. The key practices of the project include value-based increment definition, domain-driven responsibility alignment, iterative component refactoring and integration. We analyze the reengineering process of a major component qualitatively and quantitatively, with the focus on initial investment required, trend of investment, returns on investment and quality improvement. Our case study shows that incremental and iterative approach with stakeholder-value considerations can help to achieve steady and successful SPL reengineering in a cost-effective manner. We also find that SPL adoption can be regarded as an emergent result of the reconstruction and improvement of existing product assets.
Quantitative Proteomics Reveals Myosin and Actin as Promising Saliva Biomarkers for Distinguishing Pre-Malignant and Malignant Oral Lesions

Background Oral cancer survival rates increase significantly when it is detected and treated early. Unfortunately, clinicians now lack tests which easily and reliably distinguish pre-malignant oral lesions from those already transitioned to malignancy. A test for proteins, ones found in non-invasively-collected whole saliva and whose abundances distinguish these lesion types, would meet this critical need. Methodology/Principal Findings To discover such proteins, in a first-of-its-kind study we used advanced mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics analysis of the pooled soluble fraction of whole saliva from four subjects with pre-malignant lesions and four with malignant lesions. We prioritized candidate biomarkers via bioinformatics and validated selected proteins by western blotting. Bioinformatic analysis of differentially abundant proteins and initial western blotting revealed increased abundance of myosin and actin in patients with malignant lesions. We validated those results by additional western blotting of individual whole saliva samples from twelve other subjects with pre-malignant oral lesions and twelve with malignant oral lesions. Sensitivity/specificity values for distinguishing between different lesion types were 100%/75% (p = 0.002) for actin, and 67%/83% (p<0.00001) for myosin in soluble saliva. Exfoliated epithelial cells from subjects' saliva also showed increased myosin and actin abundance in those with malignant lesions, linking our observations in soluble saliva to abundance differences between pre-malignant and malignant cells. Conclusions/Significance Salivary actin and myosin abundances distinguish oral lesion types with sensitivity and specificity rivaling other non-invasive oral cancer tests. Our findings provide a promising starting point for the development of non-invasive and inexpensive salivary tests to reliably detect oral cancer early.
CircleBuy: a visual search based second screen application of buying products in videos

Visual search aims to find information based on visual features of objects, and it is extremely useful when specific keywords for describing an object are unknown. Visual search has been considered as one of the most exciting trends in e-commerce. CircleBuy is a second screen application that leverages visual search to allow users to select pieces of furniture in a video and to receive similar product recommendations. In addition, our application attempts to support users in making purchase decisions by showing a 3D model of the piece of furniture that helps them to explore the product in detail. Products can furthermore be shared on television to discuss them with friends and family. This paper presents the concepts behind CircleBuy, its engineering and implementation aspects, and its evaluation. The concept was evaluated with 22 subjects in a simulated home environment. The results demonstrate the meaningfulness of the concept and offer insight into the utility and usability of the design of such a visual search based application.
Performance of Block Turbo Coded OFDM with 16-QAM Modulation in Rayleigh Fading Channel

In this contribution the performance of Reed-Solomon (RS) Block Turbo Coding (BTC) is studied in a 16-QAM modulated OFDM system when operating on a Rayleigh fading channel. BER and PER performances are shown and compared to the performance of Convolutional Turbo Coding (CTC). BTC proves to mitigate the irreducible error floor that limits the performance of CTC at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR).
Dynamically adapting an AI game engine based on players' eye movements and strategies

Artificial intelligence (AI) game engines have frequently been used to drive computational antagonists when playing games against humans. Limited work exists, however, on using human players' psychophysical measures to directly parametrise AI game engines. Instead, parameters to optimise AI performance are usually derived from general play-related data or user models. This paper presents novel research on using eye movement data in addition to data on users' strategies to adapt the live play of a computational antagonist in the visuo-spatial strategy game, Hex. It offers a set of suitable parameters for both types of data. A systematic evaluation of the approach showed, among other things, that using eye movement data led to significantly better gameplay experience for human players, as they experienced less frustration with sufficient challenge. Findings are discussed not only with regard to designing gameplay experience, but also their more general ramifications on using live psychophysical data for intelligent interactive systems.
FPGA-driven pseudorandom number generators aimed at accelerating Monte Carlo methods

Hardware acceleration in High Performance Computing (HPC) context is of growing interest, particularly in the field of Monte Carlo methods where the resort to Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has been proven as an effective media, capable of enhancing by several orders the speed execution of stochastic processes. The spread-use of reconfigurable hardware for stochastic simulation gathered a significant effort towards effective implementations of hardware pseudorandom numbers generators (PRNGs) - these generators needed to exhibit a statistically proven random behaviour and to be charactarized by a very long period. In this paper we present the state of the art of hardware pseudorandom number generation in the context of Monte Carlo acceleration. We highlight the emerging trends over the most recent publications and suggest some insights on the forthcoming works. Furthermore, we provide a complete hardware description of a new gaussian variate generator (GVG) and an exponential variate generator (EVG) based on a decision-tree technique of ours, herein presented as well. The prototypes implemented on a Xilinx Virtex II Pro XC2VP100 FPGA occupy from 150 to 417 slices and reach 280 MHz, while exhibiting good statistical behaviours with high p-values on the x2 test and offering a unitary Knuth ratio.
High resolution, fluorescence deconvolution microscopy and tagging with the autofluorescent tracers CFP, GFP, and YFP to study the structural composition of gap junctions in living cells

High‐resolution, fluorescence deconvolution (DV) microscopy was implemented to obtain a detailed view of the organization and structural composition of gap junctions assembled from one or two different connexin isotypes in live and fixed cells. To visualize gap junctions, the structural protein components of gap junction channels, the connexin polypeptides α1(Cx43), β1(Cx32), and β2(Cx26), were tagged on their C‐termini with the autofluorescent tracers green fluorescent protein (GFP), and its cyan (CFP), and yellow (YFP) color variants. Tagged connexins were expressed in transiently transfected HeLa cells. Comprehensive analysis including dye‐transfer analysis demonstrated that the tagged connexins trafficked, assembled, and packed normally into functional gap junction channel plaques. Such gap junction plaques were examined by single, dual, and triple‐color DV microscopy. High‐resolution images and three‐dimensional volume reconstructions of gap junction plaques were obtained by this technique, which revealed several new aspects of gap junction structure. Specifically, the studies demonstrated that the mode of channel distribution strictly depends on the connexin isotypes. Here we present such images, and volume reconstructions in context with images obtained by other light, and electron microscopic techniques, such as laser scanning confocal, conventional wide‐field fluorescence, thin section, and freeze‐fracture electron microscopy. In addition, we give a simple description of the principal mechanisms of DV microscopy, name advantages and disadvantages, and discuss issues such as dual‐color imaging using CFP and YFP, spatial resolution, colocalization, and avoiding imaging artifacts. Microsc. Res. Tech. 52:251–262, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Mitigating SQL Injection Attacks via Hybrid Threat Modelling

Web applications dependent on back-end databases are currently not immune to SQL injection attacks despite huge investment in security artefacts and defensive software mechanisms deployed by organizations. These forms of attacks involve the insertion of malformed strings or specially crafted input encoded as SQL query into web forms or http header requests to web servers. While many techniques have been rigorously applied at the implementation, testing and deployment phases of the software development life cycle, this paper proposes a Hybrid Threat Modeling Framework, MOTH, for tackling SQL injection exploits at the design phase, an earlier development phase of the SDLC.
An Enhanced Secure and Scalable Model for Enterprise Applications using Automated Monitoring

E-Business must be highly secured and scalable to provide efficient services to millions of clients on the web. This paper proposes a new approach based on shared objects to improve security and mobile agents to improve scalability. The e-business uses shared objects and mobile agents to update the clients automatically with new information. The agent that resides in the database server is informed about the new information by triggering a function. Then the agent updates the shared object which is accessed by another agent that sends the information to the clients. This approach improves security, as clients are not aware of the location of central database and makes e-business more scalable by deploying mobile agents. The shared object is designed in such a way that it synchronizes the data transfer between agents. Proposed approach is implemented in a testing environment and the performance is analyzed. The analysis has shown that the proposed approach improves the security of business data and scalability of database servers providing synchronized data transfer.
The WiSe Box: a Multi-performer Wireless Sensor Interface using WiFi and OSC

The Wise Box is a new wireless digitizing interface for sensors and controllers. An increasing demand for this kind of hardware, especially in the field of dance and computer performance lead us to design a wireless digitizer that allows for multiple users, with high bandwidth and accuracy. The interface design was initiated in early 2004 and shortly described in reference [1] Our recent effort was directed to make this device available for the community on the form of a manufactured product, similarly to our previous interfaces such as AtoMIC Pro, Eobody or Ethersense [1][2][3]. We describe here the principles we used for the design of the device as well as its technical specifications. The demo will show several devices running at once and used in real-time with a various set of sensors.
Spatial Pattern of Populus euphratica Forest Change as Affected by Water Conveyance in the Lower Tarim River

To restore declining species, including Populus euphratica and other riparian communities, in the river ecosystem of the lower Tarim River, the ecological water conveyance project (EWCP), as a part of an integrated water resource management plan, was implemented in 2000. The EWCP aims to schedule and manage the water resources in the upper reaches and transfer water to the lower reaches by a series of intermittent water deliveries. The delivered water flows along a modified river channel and nourishes riparian communities by river overflow flooding. Since it began, it has caused a fierce debate over the response of riparian vegetation to the water conveyance scheme. This study focuses on the lower Tarim River, where Populus euphratica forests have undergone watering, due to the EWCP. Twelve Landsat sensor images and one IKONOS satellite imagery acquired between 1999 and 2009 were used to monitor the change in Populus euphratica forests. Bi-temporal change detection and temporal trajectory analysis were employed to represent the spatial pattern of the forest change. Field investigations were used to analyze the driving forces behind forest change from the perspectives of anthropogenic activities and natural forces. The results showed that Populus euphratica forest have been declining in area, which implies that ecological risks have been increased during the watering process. However, forests areas have increased in the regions where the water supply is abundant, and vice versa.
Network User Interest Pattern Mining Based on Entropy Clustering Algorithm

This paper proposed an automatic clustering algorithm based on entropy for discovering the interest pattern over users' web log. We introduced the information entropy on the basis of clustering algorithm. Compared with traditional clustering algorithms, our method does not require any parameters specified by the end user. Meanwhile, it can discover the clusters in arbitrary shape and size. Experimental results over real-world dataset have fully demonstrated the advantages of our algorithm, which is effective in the problem of high-dimensional and non-informative priors pattern recognition.
Scheduling Parallel Futures By Work Stealing

The choice of scheduling policy can have dramatic effects on the performance of implicitly-threaded parallel programs. Work stealing has been shown to be an efficient method for scheduling fine-grained tasks in programs that use fork-join parallelism, but there has been little work studying this form of scheduling in languages that support parallel pipelining. Pipelining allows programmers to express a wider range of programs. We study futures as a means to implement pipelining. While there is an established implementation of work stealing for fork-join parallelism based on double-ended queues, there is no established implementation that supports parallel futures or other pipelining constructs. We identify a number of important design choices in any such implementation. To understand the effects of these choices, we have implemented several of these schedulers for a deterministic parallel language with futures. We evaluate these implementations by running a suite of benchmarks that use both a combination of fork-join parallelism and futures. We compare them by measuring not only steals and space use but also deviations, a generalization of steals.
Transcriptomics profiling of Indian mustard (Brassica juncea) under arsenate stress identifies key candidate genes and regulatory pathways

Arsenic (As) is a non-essential element, a groundwater pollutant, whose uptake by plants produces toxic effects. The use of As-contaminated groundwater for irrigation can affect the crop productivity. Realizing the importance of the Brassica juncea as a crop plant in terms of oil-yield, there is a need to unravel mechanistic details of response to As stress and identify key functional genes and pathways. In this research, we studied time-dependent (4–96 h) transcriptome changes in roots and shoots of B. juncea under arsenate [As(V)] stress using Agilent platform. Among the whole transcriptome profiled genes, a total of 1,285 genes showed significant change in expression pattern upon As(V) exposure. The differentially expressed genes were categorized to various signaling pathways including hormones (jasmonate, abscisic acid, auxin, and ethylene) and kinases. Significant effects were also noticed on genes related to sulfur, nitrogen, CHO, and lipid metabolisms along with photosynthesis. Biochemical assays were conducted using specific inhibitors of glutathione and jasmonate biosynthesis, and kinases. The inhibitor studies revealed interconnection among sulfur metabolism, jasmonate, and kinase signaling pathways. In addition, various transposons also constituted a part of the altered transcriptome. Lastly, we profiled a set of key functional up- and down-regulated genes using real-time RT-PCR, which could act as an early indicators of the As stress.
Number 1910 Incomplete Markets , Growth , and the Business Cycle

We introduce a Ramsey growth model with incomplete markets, decentralized production , and idiosyncratic technological risk. The combination of uninsurable shocks with the precautionary motive can slow down capital accumulation or give rise to persistent fluctuations even when agents are very patient and technology is strictly convex. The model generates closed-form expressions for the equilibrium dynamics under a finite or infinite horizon. Multiple steady states and poverty traps can arise from the endogene-ity of the interest rate instead of the usual wealth effect. Depending on the economy's parameters, the local dynamics around a steady state are locally unique, totally unstable or locally undetermined, and the equilibrium path can be attracted to a limit cycle. In calibrated examples, financial incompleteness substantially slows down convergence to the steady state and thus increases the persistence of aggregate shocks. * We are grateful to Abhijit Banerjee and Robert Barro for stimulating discussions. We also received helpful comments from P.