Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanisms for unbounded, conflict-robust hardware transactional memory

MECHANISMS FOR UNBOUNDED, CONFLICT-ROBUST HARDWARE TRANSACTIONAL MEMORY Colin Blundell Supervisor: Milo M. K. Martin Conventional lock implementations serialize access to critical sections guarded by the same lock, presenting programmers with a difficult tradeoff between granularity of synchronization and amount of parallelism realized. Recently, researchers have been investigating an emerging synchronization mechanism called transactional memory as an alternative to such conventional lock-based synchronization. Memory transactions have the semantics of executing in isolation from one another while in reality executing speculatively in parallel, aborting when necessary to maintain the appearance of isolation. This combination of coarse-grained isolation and optimistic parallelism has the potential to ease the tradeoff presented by lock-based programming. This dissertation studies the hardware implementation of transactional memory, making three main contributions. First, we propose the permissions-only cache, a mechanism that efficiently increases the size of transactions that can be handled in the local cache hierarchy to optimize performance. Second, we propose OneTM, an unbounded hardware transactional memory system that serializes transactions that escape the local cache hierarchy. Finally, we propose RetCon, a novel mechanism for detecting conflicts that reduces conflicts by allowing transactions to commit with different values than those with which they executed as long as dataflow and control-flow constraints are maintained.
Differential Expression of Placental Glucocorticoid Receptors and Growth Arrest-Specific Transcript 5 in Term and Preterm Pregnancies: Evidence for Involvement of Maternal Stress

Pregnancy-specific stress predicts birth outcomes. We hypothesized that there is a maternal stress-GR interaction that can influence fetal birth weight. This study examined the relationship between mothers' stress and attitude towards their pregnancies, placental glucocorticoid receptors (GRs) and growth arrest-specific transcript 5 (GAS5) expression, and the status of GR polymorphism, with their infants' birth weights. GAS5 and GRα were the predominant transcripts in both term and preterm placentas, with GAS5 being primarily localized in the syncytiotrophoblasts. In an attempt to mimic moderate and high stress environment in vitro, BeWo and JEG-3 cytotrophoblast cell lines were treated with 10 nM–1000 nM cortisol. Only expression of GAS5 was significantly upregulated by cortisol in all treatments compared with basal levels, but none of the GRs changed expression significantly. In an attempt to assess a stress versus gene interaction, we studied four GR polymorphisms. In the homozygous group for Tth111I polymorphism, mothers with negative attitudes towards the pregnancy gave birth to infants with significantly lower birth weights compared to women with positive/neutral attitudes. None of the GR splice variants were associated with maternal stress. However, placental GAS5 levels were inversely correlated with maternal stress. This study points towards a potential gene-environment interaction that could be of predictive value for fetal weight.
Reducing Spike Train Variability: A Computational Theory Of Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity

Experimental studies have observed synaptic potentiation when a presynaptic neuron fires shortly before a postsynaptic neuron, and synaptic depression when the presynaptic neuron fires shortly after. The dependence of synaptic modulation on the precise timing of the two action potentials is known as spike-timing dependent plasticity or STDP. We derive STDP from a simple computational principle: synapses adapt so as to minimize the postsynaptic neuron's variability to a given presynaptic input, causing the neuron's output to become more reliable in the face of noise. Using an entropy-minimization objective function and the biophysically realistic spike-response model of Gerstner (2001), we simulate neurophysiological experiments and obtain the characteristic STDP curve along with other phenomena including the reduction in synaptic plasticity as synaptic efficacy increases. We compare our account to other efforts to derive STDP from computational principles, and argue that our account provides the most comprehensive coverage of the phenomena. Thus, reliability of neural response in the face of noise may be a key goal of cortical adaptation.
High-Speed Low-Current Duobinary Signaling Over Active Terminated Chip-to-Chip Interconnect

In this work we propose high-speed low-current duobinary signaling scheme over an active terminated chip-to-chip interconnect. The active termination scheme eliminates the need of any dedicated passive terminator both at the transmitter and receiver, avoiding signal reflection. Elimination of the passive terminator helps to reduce the transmitted signal level without effecting signal detect-ability of the receiver and also removes the thermal noise of the terminator. To implement bandwidth efficient duobinary signaling, we present a current-mode high-speed precoder operating at 10-Gb/s. A low-current active terminated driver based on modified Cherry-Hooper topology is proposed. At the receive-end, we propose an active terminated current-mode receiver(Rx) with regulated gate cascode (RGC) based transimpedance amplifier(TIA). Folded active inductor peaking is used to enhance the bandwidth of this TIA. We also propose lowpower broadband equalizer topology for channel equalization. The duobinary transmitter and receiver circuits are implemented in 1.8-V, 0.18-μm Digital CMOS technology with an f_T of 27-GHz. The designed high speed duobinary Tx/Rx circuits work up-to 8-Gb/s speed while transmitting the data over FR4 PCB trace of length 29.5-inch and for the targeted bit-error-rate(BER) of 10^−12. The power consumed in the transmitter and receiver circuits is 42.9-mW at 8-Gb/s
Free-flying robots in space: an overview of dynamics modeling, planning and control

SUMMARY Free-flying space manipulator systems, in which robotic manipulators are mounted on a free-flying spacecraft, are envisioned for assembling, maintenance, repair, and contingency operations in space. Nevertheless, even for fixed-base systems, control of mechanical manipulators is a challenging task. This is due to strong nonlinearities in the equations of motion, and consequently different algorithms have been suggested to control end-effector motion or force, since the early research in robotic systems. In this paper, first a brief review of basic concepts of various algorithms in controlling robotic manipulators is introduced. Then, specific problems related to application of such systems in space and a microgravity environment is highlighted. Basic issues of kinematics and dynamics modeling of such systems, trajectory planning and control strategies, cooperation of multiple arm space free-flying robots, and finally, experimental studies and technological aspects of such systems with their specific limitations are discussed.
Evaluation of a Cognitive Training Program

Cognitive Training (CT) is beginning to receive a great amount of attention as a treatment option for children and adults who have sustained brain insults, have chronic conditions such as a learning disability, or have other types of cognitively-related difficulties. There are numerous peer-reviewed articles examining CT, and yet there is confusion about what CT is and whether it is effective. The model common to most forms of CT posits that by doing “mind exercises” one produces dendrite growth that eventually leads to improved collaborative functioning of neural pathways in the brain. This study evaluated the efficacy of a CT program that is commercially available in the US Northwest. The study gathered objective and subjective data to determine whether this CT program produces significant changes in domains of special program focus, specifically short-term memory, attention and concentration, self identity, subjective impressions of improvement, and academic performance. Thirty male and female participants between the ages of 7 and 17 years agreed to participate. A prevs. post-intervention design was used, with the “post” condition consisting of intermediate vs. extended intervention durations, allowing a dose-related analysis also to be conducted. Results indicated that no prevs. post-intervention effects were detected for the domains of short-term memory, attention and concentration, self identity, and academic performance. However an intervention effect was found with subjective impressions of improvement in memory and behavior. Therefore, overall, only a limited amount of impact resulted from the CT intervention. PROGRAM EVALUATION OF COGNITIVE TRAINING v Table of
Stereochemistry and amyloid inhibition: Asymmetric triplex metallohelices enantioselectively bind to Aβ peptide

Metallosupramolecular complexes can enantioselectively target the central hydrophobic α/β discordant stretch of Aβ. Stereochemistry is vital for pharmaceutical development and can determine drug efficacy. Herein, 10 pairs of asymmetric triplex metallohelix enantiomers as a library were used to screen inhibitors of amyloid β (Aβ) aggregation via a fluorescent cell–based high-throughput method. Intriguingly, Λ enantiomers show a stronger inhibition effect than Δ enantiomers. In addition, the metallohelices with aromatic substituents are more effective than those without, revealing that these groups play a key role in the Aβ interaction. Fluorescence stopped-flow kinetic studies indicate that binding of the Λ enantiomer to Aβ is much faster than that of the Δ enantiomer. Furthermore, studies in enzyme digestion, isothermal titration calorimetry, nuclear magnetic resonance, and computational docking demonstrate that the enantiomers bind to the central hydrophobic α-helical region of Aβ13–23, although with different modes for the Λ and Δ enantiomers. Finally, an in vivo study showed that these metallohelices extend the life span of the Caenorhabditis elegans CL2006 strain by attenuating Aβ-induced toxicity. Our work will shed light on the design and screening of a metal complex as an amyloid inhibitor against Alzheimer’s disease.
Active associative sampling for author name disambiguation

One of the hardest problems faced by current scholarly digital libraries is author name ambiguity. This problem occurs when, in a set of citation records, there are records of a same author under distinct names, or citation records belonging to distinct authors with similar names. Among the several proposed methods, the most effective ones seem to be based on the direct assignment of the records to their respective authors by means of the application of supervised machine learning techniques. The effectiveness of such methods is usually directly correlated with the amount of supervised training data available. However, the acquisition of training examples requires skilled human annotators to manually label references. Aiming to reduce the set of examples needed to produce the training data, in this paper we propose a new active sampling strategy based on association rules for the author name disambiguation task. We compare our strategy with state-of-the-art supervised baselines that use the complete labeled training dataset and other active methods and show that very competitive results in terms of disambiguation effectiveness can be obtained with reductions in the training set of up to 71%.
Health Realization: An Innate Resiliency Paradigm for School Psychology.

This paper presents findings regarding the role of youth's moment to moment thinking and state of mind in determining perception. These findings, along with discoveries about innate resiliency and an understanding of the underlying principles that describe how thoughts become perception, have demonstrated efficacy in empowering youth to regain their natural well being, self motivation, and healthy thinking. This paradigm, come to be known as Health Realization shows significant promise as an antidote to alienation and emotional disorders, and in fact brings to light underlying principles that determine how perception is formed and to what extent it is clouded by past experiences as opposed to the ability of any person to function in a clearer, wiser, and more objective, insightful state of mind. The logical implications of youth focused interventions are presented along with independently conducted evaluation and research data from multiple clinical and school based programs. (Contains 39 references.) (Author) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Health Realization: An Innate Resiliency Paradigm for School Psychology
Evaluation of the Effects of Hidden Node Problems in IEEE 802.15.7 Uplink Performance

In the last few years, the increasing use of LEDs in illumination systems has been conducted due to the emergence of Visible Light Communication (VLC) technologies, in which data communication is performed by transmitting through the visible band of the electromagnetic spectrum. In 2011, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published the IEEE 802.15. 7 standard for Wireless Personal Area Networks based on VLC. Due to limitations in the coverage of the transmitted signal, wireless networks can suffer from the hidden node problems, when there are nodes in the network whose transmissions are not detected by other nodes. This problem can cause an important degradation in communications when they are made by means of the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) access control method, which is used in IEEE 802.15. 7 This research work evaluates the effects of the hidden node problem in the performance of the IEEE 802.15. 7 standard We implement a simulator and analyze VLC performance in terms of parameters like end-to-end goodput and message loss rate. As part of this research work, a solution to the hidden node problem is proposed, based on the use of idle patterns defined in the standard. Idle patterns are sent by the network coordinator node to communicate to the other nodes that there is an ongoing transmission. The validity of the proposed solution is demonstrated with simulation results.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MORAL INTEGRITY , PHSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING , AND ANXIETY

Bifurcation means split apart or divided. I have to admit that the study which provides the foundation for this article is the product of a certain bifurcation between Christian faith and psychological science. Despite the division, as a Christian and a psychologist, I am grateful to have the opportunity to explore this great divide in light of God’s truth. I do, however, ask your patience when you recognize the competing assumptions between a study designed to empirically measure moral integrity through behavioral observations and the truth that our moral selves, fragmented by sin, yearn for the perfect integrity that characterized God’s creation before the fall (Gen. 1:2628) and which can only be fully restored by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
Fairness Metrics for Multi-Threaded Processors

Multi-threaded processors execute multiple threads concurrently in order to increase overall throughput. It is well documented that multi-threading affects per-thread performance but, more importantly, some threads are affected more than others. This is especially troublesome for multi-programmed workloads. Fairness metrics measure whether all threads are affected equally. However defining equal treatment is not straightforward. Several fairness metrics for multi-threaded processors have been utilized in the literature, although there does not seem to be a consensus on what metric does the best job of measuring fairness. This paper reviews the prevalent fairness metrics and analyzes their main properties. Each metric strikes a different trade-off between fairness in the strict sense and throughput. We categorize the metrics with respect to this property. Based on experimental data for SMT processors, we suggest using the minimum fairness metric in order to balance fairness and throughput.
Semantics-aware open information extraction in the biomedical domain

The increasing amount of biomedical scientific literature published on the Web is demanding new tools and methods to automatically process and extract relevant information. Traditional information extraction has focused on recognizing well-defined entities such as genes or proteins, which constitutes the basis for extracting the relations between the recognized entities. Most of the work has focused on harvesting domain-specific, pre-specified relations, which usually requires manual labor and heavy machinery. The intrinsic features and scale of the Web demand new approaches able to cope with the diversity of documents, where the number of relations is unbounded and not known in advance. This paper presents a scalable method for the extraction of biomedical relations from text. The method is not geared to any specific sub-domain (e.g. protein-protein interactions, drug-drug interactions, etc.) and does not require any manual input or deep processing. Even better, the method uses the extracted relations to infer a set of abstract semantic relations and their signature types, which constitutes a valuable source of knowledge when constructing formal knowledge bases. We enable seamless integration of the extracted relations with the available biomedical resources through the process of semantic annotation. The proposed approach has successfully been applied to the CALBC corpus (i.e. almost a million text documents) and UMLS has been used as knowledge resource for semantic annotation.
Bone marrow characteristics associated with changes in infarct size after STEMI: a biorepository evaluation from the CCTRN TIME trial.

RATIONALE Despite significant interest in bone marrow mononuclear cell (BMC) therapy for ischemic heart disease, current techniques have resulted in only modest benefits. However, selected patients have shown improvements after autologous BMC therapy, but the contributing factors are unclear. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to identify BMC characteristics associated with a reduction in infarct size after ST-segment-elevation-myocardial infarction. METHODS AND RESULTS This prospective study comprised patients consecutively enrolled in the CCTRN TIME (Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network Timing in Myocardial Infarction Evaluation) trial who agreed to have their BMCs stored and analyzed at the CCTRN Biorepository. Change in infarct size between baseline (3 days after percutaneous coronary intervention) and 6-month follow-up was measured by cardiac MRI. Infarct-size measurements and BMC phenotype and function data were obtained for 101 patients (mean age, 56.5 years; mean screening ejection fraction, 37%; mean baseline cardiac MRI ejection fraction, 45%). At 6 months, 75 patients (74.3%) showed a reduction in infarct size (mean change, -21.0±17.6%). Multiple regression analysis indicated that infarct size reduction was greater in patients who had a larger percentage of CD31(+) BMCs (P=0.046) and in those with faster BMC growth rates in colony-forming unit Hill and endothelial-colony forming cell functional assays (P=0.033 and P=0.032, respectively). CONCLUSIONS This study identified BMC characteristics associated with a better clinical outcome in patients with segment-elevation-myocardial infarction and highlighted the importance of endothelial precursor activity in regenerating infarcted myocardium. Furthermore, it suggests that for these patients with segment-elevation-myocardial infarction, myocardial repair was more dependent on baseline BMC characteristics than on whether the patient underwent intracoronary BMC transplantation. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION INFORMATION URL http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00684021.
Experimental Studies on Automotive Radiator Performance using Water and Al2O3 Nanofluid

----The nano fluids have emerged as a new generation of heat transfer fluids attracted the attention of researchers over the past few years. Applications are chemical plants, automotive cooling, building heating, etc. Nanofluid is a new class of heat transfer fluid engineered by dispersing metallic or non metallic nanoparticles. The nano fluids like Al2O3, SiC,CuO,TiO2 are the very commonly used in thermal systems and heat exchangers. An experimental study of performance of Al2O3 nano fluid in a car radiator was studied in the present work. Nanofluid was tested in a car radiator by varying the percentage of nanoparticles mix with the water. Pure water is used in a radiator and its performance was studied. Al2O3 nano particles are mixed in water in 0.025%, 0.05% and 0.1% volume concentration and the performance was studied. The performance comparison has made between pure water and nanofluid tested in a radiator.
Technology-supported cooperative learning in secondary education

After watching the results from electronic meeting systems (EMS) use in the business arena, educators are beginning to look at EMS as a tool for group learning. Many of the initial educational uses of EMS have been focused at the university level, and only a few school systems have put the technology to use in the public schools. The University of Arizona's GroupSystems was installed at a local Tucson high school for the academic year 1994-1995. A junior-level English class at the school put it to a variety of tasks. These included prewriting brainstorming, answering lecture questions, writing letters and dialogues, and producing a research paper. Preliminary results indicate that the students in this particular class surpassed their peers in both cooperative (process) skills and writing (product) skills.
Extending WS-Security to Implement Security Protocols for Web Services

Web services use tokens provided by the WS-Security standard to implement security protocols. We propose several extensions to the WS-Security standard, including name types, key and random number extensions. The extensions are used to implement existing protocols such as ISO979 8, Kerberos or BAN-Lowe. The advantages of using these implementations rather th an the existing, binary ones, are inherited from the advantages of using Web service technologies, such as extensibility and end-to-end security across multiple environment s that do not support a connection- based communication.
Validity in Content Analysis

Content analysis involves replicable and valid methods for making inferences from observed communications to their context. As such, content analys1s is at least 75 years old. It emerged during journalistic debates over the quality of the mass media but has now become part of the repertoire of social science research methods. In the course of its evolution one notes not only an increasing level of technical sophistication and scientific rigor,and an increasing spread to different disciplines using any kind of data for analysis, but also a growing social impact of its findings. Let me consider a few examples.