Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving hamiltonian-based routing methods for on-chip networks: A turn model approach

The overall performance of Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) platforms depends highly on the efficient communication among their cores in the Network-on-Chip (NoC). Routing algorithms are responsible for the on-chip communication and traffic distribution through the network. Hence, designing efficient and high-performance routing algorithms is of significant importance. In this paper, a deadlock-free and highly adaptive path-based routing method is proposed without using virtual channels. This method strives to exploit the maximum number of minimal paths between any source and destination pair. The simulation results in terms of performance and power consumption demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the other adaptive and non-adaptive schemes. This efficiency is achieved by reducing the number of hotspots and smoothly distributing the traffic across the network.
Inhibitory effect of linoleic acid on transformation of IEC6 intestinal cells by in vitro azoxymethane treatment

The effect of linoleic acid (LA) on growth and transformation of IEC6 intestinal cells was examined. IEC6 cells expressed mRNAs of 15‐lipooxygenase (LOX15) and peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor (PPAR)γ but not COX‐2. Cell growth was suppressed by LA in a dose‐dependent manner in IEC6 cells. Three‐week treatment with LA provided IEC6 cells a quiescent state. LA‐induced growth inhibition was abrogated by exposure to antisense S‐oligodeoxynucleotides (S‐ODNs) for LOX15 and/or PPARγ. In an in vitro carcinogenesis model, IEC6 cells, which had confirmed CYP2E1 expression and activity, were continuously treated with AOM and/or LA for 40 weeks. DNA injury in AOM‐treated cells was suppressed to the control level by concurrent LA treatment. Colony formation of AOM‐treated cells in soft agar was suppressed by treatment with LA, which was reversed by exposure to antisense S‐ODNs for LOX15 and/or PPARγ. AOM‐treated IEC6 cells formed s.c. tumors in 9 of 12 mice, whereas AOM+LA‐treated cells formed no tumor. IEC6 cells showed no remarkable alteration of protein production by AOM treatment, whereas cells treated with AOM+LA showed decreased epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and phospho‐EGFR and increased BAX. These findings suggest that LA inhibited AOM‐induced transformation of COX‐2‐negative IEC6 cells, which was possibly mediated with PPARγ ligands generated by LOX15 from LA. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Obstacle Detection Using a Single Camera Stereo Sensor

In this paper we present a catadioptric stereovision system based on a single camera, two plane mirrors and a prism mounted on a rotating axis. On the one hand, the system is able to project a real scene on two half images. Thus, contrary to classical stereo system, it deals with the problem of the camera synchronisation. On the other hand, the optical axis of the system can be steered to point a region of interest of the real scene. It has been developed in the context of on-road vehicle applications and more specifically for long-range road surveillance. This degree of liberty is useful when the region of interest is far away in the front of the vehicle because it requires a long focal length to reach a sufficient resolution. This optical system is associated to a dense stereo matching algorithm and a disparity map segmentation process. We present some results we have obtained using synthetic stereo images to illustrate the functionality of this setup.
Video Links from Prison: Permeability and the Carceral World

As audio visual communication technologies are installed in prisons, these spaces of incarceration are networked with courtrooms and other non-contiguous spaces, potentially facilitating a process of permeability. Jurisdictions around the world are embracing video conferencing and the technology is becoming a major interface for prisoners’ interactions with courts and legal advisers. In this paper, I draw on fieldwork interviews with prisoners from two correction centres in New South Wales, Australia, to understand their subjective and sensorial experiences of using video links as a portal to the outside world. These interviews raised many issues including audio permeability: a soundtrack of incarceration sometimes infiltrates into the prison video studio and then the remote courtroom, framing the prisoner in the context of their detention, intruding on legal process, and affecting prisoners’ comprehension and participation.
Decision‐making for non‐invasive prenatal testing for Down syndrome: Hong Kong Chinese women's preferences for individual vs relational autonomy

Individual autonomy in antenatal screening is internationally recognized and supported. Policy and practice guidelines in various countries place emphasis on the woman's right to make her own decision and are related to concepts such as self‐determination, independence, and self‐sufficiency. In contrast, the dominant perspective in Chinese medical ethics suggests that the family is pivotal in making medical decisions, hence providing support for relational autonomy. This study explored Hong Kong Chinese pregnant women's preferences for individual vs relational autonomy for non‐invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for Down syndrome. A qualitative study was carried out using semi‐structured interviews with 36 women who had undertaken NIPT in Hong Kong. The findings show that most Hong Kong Chinese women valued aspects of both relational and individual autonomy in decision‐making for NIPT. Women expected support from doctors as experts on the topic and wanted to involve their husband in decision‐making while retaining control over the outcome. Somewhat surprisingly, the findings do not provide support for the involvement of family members in decision‐making for NIPT. The adequacy of current interpretations of autonomy in prenatal testing policies as an individual approach needs discussion, where policy developers need to find a balance between individual and relational approaches.
Chrg-http: A Tool for Micropayments on the World Wide Web

Chrg-http is a simple and secure protocol for electronic payments over the Internet, especially in an intranet environment. It is designed to support those micropayments (or more specific, electronic publishing, which have costs ranging from pennies to a few dollars. A widely used secure system Kerberos V5 has been incorporated into the http protocol. The security and authentication of a transactions is provided by Kerberos, without expensive public key cryptographic computations, or on-line processing through a centralized payment processing server, which is the case to most of the existing electronic payment systems on the World Wide Web. Our implementation is based on the billing model (or the subscription model). The simplicity of the model also helps to reduce the charging cost overhead.
Fluorescent Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism Analysis of Norwegian Bacillus cereus and Bacillus thuringiensis Soil Isolates

ABSTRACT We examined 154 Norwegian B. cereus andB. thuringiensis soil isolates (collected from five different locations), 8 B. cereus and 2B. thuringiensis reference strains, and 2Bacillus anthracis strains by using fluorescent amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP). We employed a novel fragment identification approach based on a hierarchical agglomerative clustering routine that identifies fragments in an automated fashion. No method is free of error, and we identified the major sources so that experiments can be designed to minimize its effect. Phylogenetic analysis of the fluorescent AFLP results reveals five genetic groups in these group 1 bacilli. The ATCC reference strains were restricted to two of the genetic groups, clearly not representative of the diversity in these bacteria. Both B. anthracis strains analyzed were closely related and affiliated with a B. cereus milk isolate (ATCC 4342) and a B. cereus human pathogenic strain (periodontitis). Across the entire study, pathogenic strains, including B. anthracis, were more closely related to one another than to the environmental isolates. Eight strains representing the five distinct phylogenetic clusters were further analyzed by comparison of their 16S rRNA gene sequences to confirm the phylogenetic status of these groups. This analysis was consistent with the AFLP analysis, although of much lower resolution. The innovation of automated genotype analysis by using a replicated and statistical approach to fragment identification will allow very large sample analyses in the future.
Student Perceptions Concerning the Influence of Design-Related Reality Shows

Abstract The popularity of design-related television shows has been on the rise since 2000. Within that same time span, many interior design programs have reported significant increases in enrollment. The goals of this study were to better understand the perceptions of design students to assess if design-related reality shows impacted their choice of major, as well as lead to better overall understanding regarding their motivations for watching these shows. The study included students from two accredited interior design programs. The method involved two phases of data collection: survey and focus groups. Over 90% of participants reported that they watched a design-related show at least once a week. Fifty-three percent of freshmen responded that these shows influenced their choice of major either extremely strongly, fairly strongly, or had a slight influence while only 15% of seniors had the same response. Findings indicated that student perceptions of these shows were mixed with some positive as well as negative impressions.
Using Measures of Situation Awareness to Characterize Mental Models in Inductive Reasoning Tasks

Mental models have been proposed in both the cognitive psychology and human factors literature. However, they have been applied for a variety of related but distinct representations. For system design and user training in practical applications, there remains a need to describe the characteristics of mental models. Situation awareness (SA) has been proposed as a cognitive construct critical in decision making in complex tasks and is considered to be related to operator mental models. However, there have been few empirical studies assessing SA as a basis for mental model characterizations. The primary objective of this research was to develop and validate an empirical method of SA and task performance assessment for characterizing mental models in tasks requiring SA-based decision making and action execution. A pilot study, using a multitasking scenario in virtual reality (VR), was conducted in which participants were required to attend to multiple types of perceptual events occurring randomly in time while carrying on steady physical activity (walking on a treadmill). Responses to SA probes delivered during experiment trials, mental workload ratings and task performance measures were collected and compared with response patterns expected for hypothesized mental model types. Results demonstrated utility of categorical SA responses for identifying different mental model types. However, in the multitasking scenario, the process of developing SA appeared to be substantially influenced by the physical and cognitive task demands and the development of accurate mental models of event distributions appeared to be restricted by this. To extend and further validate the approach developed in the pilot study, an inductive reasoning task paradigm was used in the primary experiment, in which participants were exposed to structured detective case stories. In order to develop a thorough understanding of a story and to identify root causes of crimes, participants needed to form a complex mental model of the story and use this model to predict the process of the crime investigation. Three different types of mental models were hypothesized to occur, including a simple list of story elements, elements grouped based on importance, and an organized network of elements. These models reflected different degrees of understanding of the story during the comprehension aspect of inductive reasoning. Measures of SA collected during participant performance of the task were related to results of another established mental model assessment method, concept mapping, in order to identify any convergence of the two methods. Participant SA and concept map accuracy were also assessed as to their predictability of knowledge test performance at the end of each story. The experiment results showed that a fuzzy inference model was effective for classifications of participant mental models in terms of measures of SA. The model inferences also supported the general hypothesis that mental model complexity increases with cumulative increases in SA across…
The relationship between the structural mere exposure effect and the implicit learning process

Three experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE) and implicit learning in an artificial grammar task. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state grammar and were asked to memorize them. In a subsequent test phase subjects were required first to rate how much they liked novel items, and second whether or not they thought items conformed to the rules of the grammar. A small but consistent effect of grammaticality was found on subjects’ liking ratings (a “structural mere exposure effect”) in all three experiments, but only when encoding and testing conditions were consistent. A change in the surface representation of stimuli between encoding and test (Experiment 1), memorizing fragments of items and being tested on whole items (Experiment 2), and a mismatch of processing operations between encoding and test (Experiment 3) all removed the SMEE. In contrast, the effect of grammaticality on rule judgements remained intact in the face of all three manipulations. It is suggested that rule judgements reflect attempts to explicitly recall information about training items, whereas the SMEE can be explained in terms of an attribution of processing fluency.
On the Value of Partial Information for Learning from Examples

The PAC model of learning and its extension to real valued function classes provides a well-accepted theoretical framework for representing the problem of learning a target functiong(x) using a random sample {(xi,g(xi))}i=1m. Based on the uniform strong law of large numbers the PAC model establishes the sample complexity, i.e., the sample sizemwhich is sufficient for accurately estimating the target function to within high confidence. Often, in addition to a random sample, some form of prior knowledge is available about the target. It is intuitive that increasing the amount of information should have the same effect on the error as increasing the sample size. But quantitatively how does the rate of error with respect to increasing information compare to the rate of error with increasing sample size? To answer this we consider a new approach based on a combination of information-based complexity of Traubet al.and Vapnik? Chervonenkis (VC) theory. In contrast to VC-theory where function classes of finite pseudo-dimension are used only for statistical-based estimation, we let such classes play a dual role of functional estimation as well as approximation. This is captured in a newly introduced quantity, ? d(F), which represents a nonlinear width of a function class F. We then extend the notion of thenth minimal radius of information and define a quantityIn,d(F) which measures the minimal approximation error of the worst-case targetg? F by the family of function classes having pseudo-dimensiondgiven partial information ongconsisting of values taken bynlinear operators. The error rates are calculated which leads to a quantitative notion of the value of partial information for the paradigm of learning from examples.
Information Appliances: Gadget Netopia

With the convergence of so many disparate technologies over the past few years, it makes sense that we are now seeing PC descendants emerge as a breed of entirely new products that use their inherited technologies in innovative ways. These inherited technologies include wireless connectivity, Internet access and ultraportability. The combination of these and other technologies is forming a new class of devices known as information appliances (IAs). IAs-a class of products that also includes Web-enabled TVs-are related to desktop computers, but unlike network computers, IAs aren't crippled PCs. IAs are a separate class of devices defining new sets of applications. In fact, they are defining several new categories of computing. Initially, these devices will add functionality to the two killer applications of consumer electronics: television and e-mail. Eventually, however, they will pull away from the more obvious extensions (like wireless handhelds and e-mail-enabled cellular phones) and find their way into cars, wristwatches, kitchen appliances, and just about anything else that can be made more useful by extending typical capabilities with new technology. Every appliance will eventually become an IA, but not as soon as some people think. The challenge for vendors is how to design and manufacture extremely easy-to-use yet sophisticated devices at prices that will attract the masses. The technical hurdles are great and the market risks are clear, but the rewards will be huge. This tension is perfect for fomenting the next revolution in computing.
Program Analysis of Cryptographic Implementations for Security

Cryptographic implementation errors in popular open source libraries (e.g., OpenSSL, GnuTLS, BotanTLS, etc.) and the misuses of cryptographic primitives (e.g., as in Juniper Network) have been the major source of vulnerabilities in the wild. These serious problems prompt the need for new compile-time security checking. Such security enforcements demand the study of various cryptographic properties and their mapping into enforceable program analysis rules. We refer to this new security approach as cryptographic program analysis (CPA). In this paper, we show how cryptographic program analysis can be performed effectively andits security applications. Specifically, we systematically investigate different threat categories on various cryptographicimplementations and their usages. Then, we derive varioussecurity rules, which are enforceable by program analysistools during code compilation. We also demonstrate the capabilities of static taint analysis to enforce most of these security rules and provide a prototype implementation. We point out promising future research and development directions in this new area of cryptographic program analysis.
Comparison of Benchtop Fourier-Transform (FT) and Portable Grating Scanning Spectrometers for Determination of Total Soluble Solid Contents in Single Grape Berry (Vitis vinifera L.) and Calibration Transfer

Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy was applied for the determination of total soluble solid contents (SSC) of single Ruby Seedless grape berries using both benchtop Fourier transform (VECTOR 22/N) and portable grating scanning (SupNIR-1500) spectrometers in this study. The results showed that the best SSC prediction was obtained by VECTOR 22/N in the range of 12,000 to 4000 cm−1 (833–2500 nm) for Ruby Seedless with determination coefficient of prediction (Rp2) of 0.918, root mean squares error of prediction (RMSEP) of 0.758% based on least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM). Calibration transfer was conducted on the same spectral range of two instruments (1000–1800 nm) based on the LS-SVM model. By conducting Kennard-Stone (KS) to divide sample sets, selecting the optimal number of standardization samples and applying Passing-Bablok regression to choose the optimal instrument as the master instrument, a modified calibration transfer method between two spectrometers was developed. When 45 samples were selected for the standardization set, the linear interpolation-piecewise direct standardization (linear interpolation-PDS) performed well for calibration transfer with Rp2 of 0.857 and RMSEP of 1.099% in the spectral region of 1000–1800 nm. And it was proved that re-calculating the standardization samples into master model could improve the performance of calibration transfer in this study. This work indicated that NIR could be used as a rapid and non-destructive method for SSC prediction, and provided a feasibility to solve the transfer difficulty between totally different NIR spectrometers.
New Functions of the Thylakoid Membrane Proteome of Arabidopsis thaliana Revealed by a Simple, Fast, and Versatile Fractionation Strategy*

Identification of membrane proteomes remains challenging. Here, we present a simple, fast, and scalable off-line procedure based on three-phase partitioning with butanol to fractionate membrane proteomes in combination with both in-gel and in-solution digestions and mass spectrometry. This should help to further accelerate the field of membrane proteomics. Using this new strategy, we analyzed the salt-stripped thylakoid membrane of chloroplasts of Arabidopsis thaliana. 242 proteins were identified, at least 40% of which are integral membrane proteins. The functions of 86 proteins are unknown; these include proteins with TPR, PPR, rhodanese, and DnaJ domains. These proteins were combined with all known thylakoid proteins and chloroplast (associated) envelope proteins, collected from primary literature, resulting in 714 non-redundant proteins. They were assigned to functional categories using a classification developed for MapMan (Thimm, O., Blasing, O., Gibon, Y., Nagel, A., Meyer, S., Kruger, P., Selbig, J., Muller, L. A., Rhee, S. Y., and Stitt, M. (2004) Plant J. 37, 914–939), updated with information from primary literature. The analysis elucidated the likely location of many membrane proteins, including 190 proteins of unknown function, holding the key to better understanding the two membrane systems. The three-phase partitioning procedure added a new level of dynamic resolution to the known thylakoid proteome. An automated strategy was developed to track possible ambiguous identifications to more than one gene model or family member. Mass spectrometry search results, ambiguities, and functional classifications can be searched via the Plastid Proteome Database.
The Roles of Left Versus Right Anterior Temporal Lobes in Conceptual Knowledge: An ALE Meta-analysis of 97 Functional Neuroimaging Studies

The roles of the right and left anterior temporal lobes (ATLs) in conceptual knowledge are a source of debate between 4 conflicting accounts. Possible ATL specializations include: (1) Processing of verbal versus non-verbal inputs; (2) the involvement of word retrieval; and (3) the social content of the stimuli. Conversely, the “hub-and-spoke” account holds that both ATLs form a bilateral functionally unified system. Using activation likelihood estimation (ALE) to compare the probability of left and right ATL activation, we analyzed 97 functional neuroimaging studies of conceptual knowledge, organized according to the predictions of the three specialized hypotheses. The primary result was that ATL activation was predominately bilateral and highly overlapping for all stimulus types. Secondary to this bilateral representation, there were subtle gradations both between and within the ATLs. Activations were more likely to be left lateralized when the input was a written word or when word retrieval was required. These data are best accommodated by a graded version of the hub-and-spoke account, whereby representation of conceptual knowledge is supported through bilateral yet graded connectivity between the ATLs and various modality-specific sensory, motor, and limbic cortices.