Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 17 mW transmitter and frequency synthesizer for 900 MHz GSM fully integrated in 0.35-/spl mu/m CMOS

We have presented the first fully integrated fractional-N PLL with on-chip VCO and on-chip modulator that meets the GSM specifications for both a receive mode synthesizer and a modulating PLL with 270.83 kbps GMSK data. Power consumption of the PLL is 13 mW in the RX synthesizer mode and 17 mW in the TX modulation mode. The circuit is fully digital, except for the loop filter which carries the analog VCO control voltage.
A deterministic subexponential algorithm for solving parity games

The existence of polynomial time algorithms for the solution of parity games is a major open problem. The fastest known algorithms for the problem are randomized algorithms that run in subexponential time. These algorithms are all ultimately based on the randomized subexponential simplex algorithms of Kalai and of Matoušek, Sharir and Welzl. Randomness seems to play an essential role in these algorithms. We use a completely different, and elementary, approach to obtain a deterministic subexponential algorithm for the solution of parity games. Our deterministic algorithm is almost as fast as the randomized algorithms mentioned above.
Simulating an Automated Approach to Discovery and Modeling of Open Source Software Development Processes

Process discovery has been shown to be a challenging problem offering limited results, however, most work has been conducted in closed source systems. This paper describes a new approach to process discovery that examines the Internet information spaces of open source software development projects. In searching for an automated solution to the process discovery problem, we first have simulated it manually by searching the Web space for evidence of process activities and reconstructing process fragments based on the clues discovered. The goal of this approach is to help reveal its challenges, strengths, weaknesses and findings such that they may be employed to determine the requirements and design of more fully automated process discovery and modeling mechanisms that can be applied to Web-based software development projects.
Expanded vs. Equal Interval Spaced Retrieval Practice: Exploring Different Schedules of Spacing and Retention Interval in Younger and Older Adults

ABSTRACT The present study was designed to help answer several questions regarding the impact of spacing and expanded retrieval on memory performance in younger and older adults. Three expanded/equal interval schedule pairings, matched in average spacing (1–2–3/2–2–2; 1–3–5/3–3–3; and 1–3–8/4–4–4), were compared, and the effect of retention interval on spaced retrieval benefits was examined by comparing performance on a same day test to a test delayed by 24 h. Both age groups showed a learning phase retrieval success advantage for expanded items compared to equal interval items. Only older adults in the same day test condition showed a significant expansion effect in final recall. After a 24-h delay, the final recall advantage for items in the expanded condition was lost in both groups, and in fact these items were at a significant recall disadvantage for younger adults. Results indicate that younger and older adults benefit from a rehearsal technique that incorporated any type of spaced retrieval whether it is distributed as an expanding schedule or not. Although we did not find robust advantages for expanded retrieval compared to equal interval practice, there could be certain advantages (such as reinforcement due to high success rates) to using expanded retrieval depending on the ultimate goals of an individual memory training program.
Absence of Dipole Glass Transition for Randomly Dilute Classical Ising Dipoles

Dilute dipolar systems in three dimensions are expected to undergo a spin glass transition as the temperature decreases. Contrary to this, we find from Wang-Landau Monte Carlo simulations that at low concentrations $x$, dipoles randomly placed on a cubic lattice with dipolar interactions do not undergo a phase transition. We find that in the thermodynamic limit the ``glass'' transition temperature ${T}_{g}$ goes to zero as $1∕\sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the number of dipoles. The entropy per particle at low temperatures is larger for lower concentrations $(x=4.5%)$ than for higher concentrations $(x=20%)$.
Aggregate and welfare effects of long run inflation risk under inflation and price-level targeting

This paper presents a DSGE model in which long run inflation risk matters for social welfare. Aggregate and welfare effects of long run inflation risk are assessed under two monetary regimes: inflation targeting (IT) and price-level targeting (PT). These effects differ because IT implies base-level drift in the price level, while PT makes the price level stationary around a target price path. Under IT, the welfare cost of long run inflation risk is equal to 0.35 per cent of aggregate consumption. Under PT, where long run inflation risk is largely eliminated, it is lowered to only 0.01 per cent. There are welfare gains from PT because it raises average consumption for the young and lowers consumption risk substantially for the old. These results are strongly robust to changes in the PT target horizon and fairly robust to imperfect credibility, fiscal policy, and model calibration. While the distributional effects of an unexpected transition to PT are sizeable, they are short-lived and not welfare-reducing.
The structure of C-polysaccharide from the walls of Streptococcus pneumoniae.

The well-known immologically active component of pneumococci, C-polysaccharide, is a teichoic acid that can be isolated from the cell walls and purified by Sephadex and ion-exchange chromatography. Further details of the structure of C-teichoic acid were established by chemical degradation, including hydrolysis in acid and alkali, treatment with HF, periodate oxidation and methylation. In addition, the use of 13C n.m. r. has confirmed some of these structural features and resulted in a proposal for the order of substituents, the location of positions of substitution and the configuration of anomeric centres in the repeating unit of the polymer.
Performance evaluation of cloud datacenters using various green computing tactics

Traditionally, the primary focus of datacenter and network designers has been on the performance improvement and high system throughput. Energy consumption has been rarely a design consideration. But in the recent years, the ICT sector has grown exponentially and many studies, on energy consumption of datacenters, reveal that there is requirement of developing new mechanisms, for using energy efficiently in ICT area. Datacenters comprising of computing and communicating devices, are responsible for Green House Gas ( like CO2 ) emissions and adds a lot to carbon footprints due to non power aware hardware and software designs. In the present work, various green computing concepts that can be implemented at hardware as well as software levels to reduce power consumption, have been studied. The experimental work presents the simulation environment that captures the energy consumption of computing and communicating devices of the cloud environment. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of various green computing tactics over the classical methods of computing using various datacenter architectures.
Soft trust and mCommerce shopping behaviours

Recently, there has been widespread growth of shopping and buying on mobile devices, termed mCommerce. With this comes a need to understand how to best design experiences for mobile shopping. To help address this, we conducted a diary and interview study with mCommerce shoppers who have already adopted the technology and shop on their mobile devices regularly. Our study explores typical mCommerce routines and behaviours along with issues of soft trust, given its long-term concern for eCommerce. Our results describe spontaneous purchasing and routine shopping behaviours where people gravitate to their mobile device even if a computer is nearby. We found that participants faced few trust issues because they had limited access to unknown companies. In addition, app marketplaces and recommendations from friends offered a form of brand protection. These findings suggest that companies can decrease trust issues by tying mCommerce designs to friend networks and known marketplaces. The caveat for shoppers, however, is that they can be easily lured into a potentially false sense of trust.
The fading affect bias: Effects of social disclosure to an interactive versus non-responsive listener

The intensity of negative emotions associated with event memories fades to a greater extent over time than positive emotions (fading affect bias or FAB). In this study, we examine how the presence and behaviour of a listener during social disclosure influences the FAB and the linguistic characteristics of event narratives. Participants recalled pleasant and unpleasant events and rated each event for its emotional intensity. Recalled events were then allocated to one of three experimental conditions: no disclosure, private verbal disclosure without a listener or social disclosure to another participant whose behaviour was experimentally manipulated. Participants again rated the emotional intensity of the events immediately after these manipulations and after a one-week delay. Verbal disclosure alone was not sufficient to enhance the FAB. However, social disclosure increased positive emotional intensity, regardless of the behaviour of the listener. Whilst talking to an interactive listener led unpleasant event memories to decrease in emotional intensity, talking to a non-responsive listener increased their negative emotional intensity. Further, listener behaviour influenced the extent of emotional expression in written event narratives. This study provides original evidence that listener behaviour during social disclosure is an important factor in the effects of social disclosure in the FAB.
Achieving sub-second IGP convergence in large IP networks

We describe and analyse in details the various factors that influence the convergence time of intradomain link state routing protocols. This convergence time reflects the time required by a network to react to the failure of a link or a router. To characterise the convergence process, we first use detailed measurements to determine the time required to perform the various operations of a link state protocol on currently deployed routers. We then build a simulation model based on those measurements and use it to study the convergence time in large networks. Our measurements and simulations indicate that sub-second link-state IGP convergence can be easily met on an ISP network without any compromise on stability.
Gains in Life Expectancy Associated with Higher Education in Men

Background Many studies show large differences in life expectancy across the range of education, intelligence, and socio-economic status. As educational attainment, intelligence, and socio-economic status are highly interrelated, appropriate methods are required to disentangle their separate effects. The aim of this paper is to present a novel method to estimate gains in life expectancy specifically associated with increased education. Our analysis is based on a structural model in which education level, IQ at age 18 and mortality all depend on (latent) intelligence. The model allows for (selective) educational choices based on observed factors and on an unobserved factor capturing intelligence. Our estimates are based on information from health examinations of military conscripts born in 1944–1947 in The Netherlands and their vital status through age 66 (n = 39,798). Results Our empirical results show that men with higher education have lower mortality. Using structural models to account for education choice, the estimated gain in life expectancy for men moving up one educational level ranges from 0.3 to 2 years. The estimated gain in months alive over the observational period ranges from -1.2 to 5.7 months. The selection effect is positive and amounts to a gain of one to two months. Decomposition of the selection effect shows that the gain from selection on (latent) intelligence is larger than the gain from selection on observed factors and amounts to 1.0 to 1.7 additional months alive. Conclusion Our findings confirm the strong selection into education based on socio-economic status and intelligence. They also show significant higher life expectancy among individuals with higher education after the selectivity of education choice has been taken into account. Based on these estimates, it is plausible therefore that increases in education could lead to increases in life expectancy.
Transition invariants

Proof rules for program verification rely on auxiliary assertions. We propose a (sound and relatively complete) proof rule whose auxiliary assertions are transition invariants. A transition invariant of a program is a binary relation over program states that contains the transitive closure of the transition relation of the program. A relation is disjunctively well-founded if it is a finite union of well-founded relations. We characterize the validity of termination or another liveness property by the existence of a disjunctively well-founded transition invariant. The main contribution of our proof rule lies in its potential for automation via abstract interpretation.
Convergence to global optima for genetic programming systems with dynamically scaled operators

This work shows asymptotic convergence to global optima for a family of dynamically scaled genetic programming systems where the underlying population consists of a fixed number of creatures (individuals) each of arbitrary size. The genetic programming systems use common mutation and crossover operators as well as fitness-proportional selection. In addition, the mutation and crossover rates are annealed to zero in predefined fashion over the course of the algorithm, and power-law scaling is used for the (possibly population-dependent) initial fitness function with (unbounded) logarithmic growth in the exponent.We assume that a set of globally optimal creatures for the optimization problem instance exists. In addition, it is assumed that the ratio of the best fitness of globally optimal creatures vs the fitness of other creatures is greater or equal a constant ρ>1 in any population they jointly reside in. We discuss how both conditions can usually be satisfied in application settings. Under the above conditions, a selected, traceable sequence of probability distributions over the possible states of the properly scaled genetic programming system converge in time towards the convex set of probability distributions over uniform populations that contain only globally optimal creatures.
NCAM1, TACR1 and NOS Genes and Temperament: A Study on Suicide Attempters and Controls

Suicide, one of the leading causes of death among young adults, seems to be plausibly modulated by both genetic and personality factors. The aim of this study was to dissect the potential association between genetics and temperament in a sample of 111 suicide attempters and 289 healthy controls. We focused on 4 genes previously investigated in association with suicide on the same sample: the nitric oxide synthase 1 and 3 (NOS1 and NOS3), the neuronal cell adhesion molecule 1 (NCAM1), and the tachykinin receptor 1 (TACR1) genes. In particular, we investigated whether a set of genetic variants in these genes (NOS1: rs2682826, rs1353939, rs693534; NOS3: rs2070744, rs1799983, rs891512; NCAM1: rs2301228, rs1884, rs1245113, rs1369816, rs2196456, rs584427; TACR1: rs3771810, rs3771825, rs726506, rs1477157) were associated with temperamental traits at the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). No strong evidence was found for the association between TCI personality traits and the polymorphisms considered in the 4 genes, with the exception of an association between reward dependence trait and the rs2682826 SNP in NOS1 in the healthy sample. However, this result could be plausibly interpreted as a false-positive finding. In conclusion, our study did not support the thesis of a direct modulation of these genes on temperament; however, further studies on larger samples are clearly required in order to confirm our preliminary findings and to exclude any possible minor influence.
U-shaped Networks for Shape from Light Field

This paper presents a novel technique for Shape from Light Field (SfLF), that utilizes deep learning strategies. Our model is based on a fully convolutional network, that involves two symmetric parts, an encoding and a decoding part, leading to a u-shaped network architecture. By leveraging a recently proposed Light Field (LF) dataset, we are able to effectively train our model using supervised training. To process an entire LF we split the LF data into the corresponding Epipolar Plane Image (EPI) representation and predict each EPI separately. This strategy provides good reconstruction results combined with a fast prediction time. In the experimental section we compare our method to the state of the art. The method performs well in terms of depth accuracy, and is able to outperform competing methods in terms of prediction time by a large margin.
On the deployment of multimedia services in wireless networks: radio dimensioning aspects for UTRAN FDD

In this paper, we address the radio dimensioning issue that arises from the introduction of novel services in WCDMA networks. To investigate the impact and entailed limitations of the deployment of new services on the performance of the offered ones, we propose plain methods and a simulator for radio interface dimensioning. The tool (based on throughput estimates and snapshots of the system status) supports essential radio resource management functions, as admission control and packet scheduler with QoS differentiation. For each of the accessible services, we define the corresponding user satisfaction criterion, and performance results, at a given QoS, are presented as the maximum number of subscribers a WCDMA cell can satisfactorily accommodate. Several case studies on the deployment of PoC (push to talk over cellular) in realistic mixed service scenarios are analyzed in this work. Simulation results show that no extra capacity is required for PoC launch.
3-D magnetic nanostructures

We investigated the influence of 3-D magnetic layer geometry on switching in magneto-electronic devices. We found that the 3-D topography of magnetic layer must absolutely be taken into consideration during the design phase since their inherent non-planarity profoundly affects their magnetization profile. Our initial results strongly indicate that the “non-flatness” of magnetic layer strongly influences the possible magnetic states, alters the switching mechanism and leads to totally new behavior, which was not observed in classic 2-D thin film magnetic structures. Our experimental results will be compared with detailed micromagnetic simulations.
Discovery of Mosquito Saliva MicroRNAs during CHIKV Infection

Mosquito borne pathogens are transmitted to humans via saliva during blood feeding. Mosquito saliva is a complex concoction of many secretory factors that modulate the feeding foci to enhance pathogen infection and establishment. Multiple salivary proteins/factors have been identified/characterized that enhance pathogen infection. Here, we describe, for the first time, the identification of exogenous microRNAs from mosquito saliva. MicroRNAs are short, 18–24 nucleotide, non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression, and are generally intracellular. However, circulating miRNAs have been described from serum and saliva of humans. Exogenous miRNAs have not been reported from hematophagous arthropod saliva. We sought to identify miRNAs in the mosquito saliva and their role in Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection. Next generation sequencing was utilized to identify 103 exogenous miRNAs in mosquito saliva of which 31 miRNAs were previously unidentified and were designated novel. Several miRNAs that we have identified are expressed only in the CHIKV infected mosquitoes. Five of the saliva miRNAs were tested for their potential to regulated CHIKV infection, and our results demonstrate their functional role in the transmission and establishment of infection during blood feeding on the host.
Effect of gestational diabetes and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy on postpartum cardiometabolic risk

Aims The cumulative effect of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) on postpartum cardio-metabolic diseases is equivocal. We aimed to assess the associations of GDM and HDP’s individual and synergic contribution to risks of postpartum cardio-metabolic diseases (metabolic syndrome (MetS), abnormal glucose metabolism and hypertension (HTN)). Methods Of participants from a Singapore birth cohort, 276 mothers attending the 5-year postpartum visit were included in this study. During this visit, we collected mothers’ history of GDM and HDP in all live births in a chronicle sequence and assessed the cardio-metabolic risks based on blood pressure, anthropometry and a panel of serum biomarkers. We diagnosed MetS, abnormal glucose metabolism and HTN according to Adult Treatment Panel III 2000 and World Health Organization guidelines. Results Of 276 mothers, 157 (56.9%) had histories of GDM while 23 (8.3%) had histories of HDP. After full adjustment, we found associations of GDM episodes with postpartum abnormal glucose metabolism (single episode: relative risk (RR) 2.9 (95% CI: 1.7, 4.8); recurrent episodes (≥2): RR = 3.8 (2.1–6.8)). Also, we found association between histories of HDP and HTN (RR = 3.6 (1.5, 8.6)). Having either (RR 2.6 (1.7–3.9)) or both gestational complications (RR 2.7 (1.6–4.9)) was associated with similar risk of postpartum cardio-metabolic disease. Conclusions Mothers with GDM or HDP had a threefold increased risk of postpartum abnormal glucose metabolism or HTN, respectively. Having both GDM and HDP during past pregnancies was not associated with additional risk of postpartum cardio-metabolic diseases beyond that associated with either complication alone.
Piezoresistive response of Pluronic-wrapped single-wall carbon nanotube–epoxy composites

This article reports on the piezoresistive behaviour of polymer-based nanocomposites, which are composed of epoxy resins and Pluronic-wrapped carbon nanotubes. The samples were prepared with carbon nanotube concentrations up to 1 wt. %. Good carbon nanotube dispersion was achieved due to the Pluronic wrapping of the carbon nanotube, as confirmed by electron and atomic force microscopies. The correlation between the electrical resistivity and mechanical strain was obtained for varying mechanical deformation. The electrical response is linear for small strains, and the values of the gauge factor are ∼2.6. The small variations of the signal over 32 cycles, the time response to deformations from 0.1 to 50 mm min−1 and the stable temperature behaviour up to 60°C show the viability of these materials to be used as piezoresistive sensors.
BEA liquid data for WebLogic: XML-based enterprise information integration

This presentation provides a technical overview of BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic, a relatively new product from BEA Systems that provides enterprise information integration capabilities to enterprise applications that are built and deployed using the BEA WebLogic Platform. Liquid Data takes an XML-centric approach to tackling the long-standing problem of integrating data from disparate data sources and making that information easily accessible to applications. In particular, Liquid Data uses the forthcoming XQuery language standard as the basis for defining integrated views of enterprise data and querying over those views. We provide a brief overview of the Liquid Data product architecture and then discuss some of the query processing technology that lies at the heart of the product.