Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Early Endocrine Stress Response in Experimental Subarachnoid Hemorrhage

Introduction In patients with severe illness, such as aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a physiologic stress response is triggered. This includes activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic nervous system. The aim of this study was to investigate the very early responses of these systems. Methods A porcine animal model of aneurysmal SAH was used. In this model, blood is injected slowly to the basal cisterns above the anterior skull base until the cerebral perfusion pressure is 0 mm Hg. Sampling was done from blood and urine at -10, +15, +75 and +135 minutes from time of induction of SAH. Analyses of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), cortisol, aldosterone, catecholamines and chromogranin-A were performed. Results Plasma ACTH, serum cortisol and plasma aldosterone increased in the samples following induction of SAH, and started to decline after 75 minutes. Urine cortisol also increased after SAH. Urine catecholamines and their metabolites were found to increase after SAH. Many samples were however below detection level, not allowing for statistical analysis. Plasma chromogranin-A peaked at 15 minutes after SAH, and thereafter decreased. Conclusions The endocrine stress response after aneurysmal SAH was found to start within 15 minutes in the HPA axis with early peak values of ACTH, cortisol and aldosterone. The fact that the concentrations of the HPA axis hormones decreased 135 minutes after SAH may suggest that a similar pattern exists in SAH patients, thus making it difficult to catch these early peak values. There were also indications of early activation of the sympathetic nervous system, but the small number of valid samples made interpretation difficult.
Differential 2 R Crosspoint RRAM for Memory System in Mobile Electronics with Zero Standby Current

— The leakage power consumption of memories is becoming dominant in a system as technology scaling down. Fast nonvolatile memories (NVMs) offer a tremendous opportunity to eliminate memory leakage current during standby mode. Resistive random access memory (RRAM) with crosspoint structure is considered to be one of the most promising emerging NVMs. However, the absence of access transistors puts big challenges to the write/read operation. In this paper, we propose the differential 2R crosspoint structure to increase the read margin. A 64KB RRAM is constructed by 28/32nm Predictive Technology Models (PTM) and simulated by Eldo. Circuit techniques, such as divided WL and Sense-before-Write, are employed to reduce write leakage and elongate the endurance. Finally, the comparison between SRAM and RRAM allows us to investigate the possibility of utilizing RRAM as cache for increasing energy efficiency in mobile electronics.
Supercritical multitype branching processes in continuous time: the ancestral types of typical individuals

For supercritical multitype branching processes in continuous time, we investigate the evolution of types along those lineages that survive up to some time t. We establish almost-sure convergence theorems for both time and population averages of ancestral types (conditioned on non-extinction), and identify the mutation process describing the type evolution along typical lineages. An important tool is a representation of the family tree in terms of a suitable size-biased tree with trunk. As a by-product, this representation allows a ‘conceptual proof’ (in the sense of [17]) of the continuous-time version of the Kesten-Stigum theorem.
ScaLAPACK's MRRR algorithm

The (sequential) algorithm of Multiple Relatively Robust Representations, MRRR, is a more efficient variant of inverse iteration that does not require reorthogonalization. It solves the eigenproblem of an unreduced symmetric tridiagonal matrix T ∈ Rn × n at O(n2) cost. The computed normalized eigenvectors are numerically orthogonal in the sense that the dot product between different vectors is O (n ε), where ε refers to the relative machine precision. This article describes the design of ScaLAPACK's parallel MRRR algorithm. One emphasis is on the critical role of the representation tree in achieving both adequate accuracy and parallel scalability. A second point concerns the favorable properties of this code: subset computation, the use of static memory, and scalability. Unlike ScaLAPACK's Divide & Conquer and QR, MRRR can compute subsets of eigenpairs at reduced cost. And in contrast to inverse iterations which can fail, it is guaranteed to produce a satisfactory answer while maintaining memory scalability. ParEig, the parallel MRRR algorithm for PLAPACK, uses dynamic memory allocation. This is avoided by our code at marginal additional cost. We also use a different representation tree criterion that allows for more accurate computation of the eigenvectors but can make parallelization more difficult.
Fundamental Analysis, Institutional Investment, and Limits to Arbitrage

Previous research documents that financial ratios (fundamental signals) derived from publicly available financial statements can predict future abnormal stock returns. This paper examines whether institutional investors trade on these fundamental signals and the implications of institutional investors' trading for stock valuation. We provide evidence that transient institutional investors (institutions who actively trade securities for short-term returns) trade on fundamental signals. We also show that the abnormal returns associated with fundamental signals increase with transaction costs and arbitrage risk, indicating the existence of the limits to arbitrage for this investment strategy. We further document that transient institutions trade less aggressively to exploit the fundamental-signal-based trading strategy in firms with higher transaction costs and arbitrage risk, and their arbitrage trades help reduce the returns related to fundamental signals. This paper provides evidence helping to explain the abnormal returns associated with fundamental signals and contributes to our understanding of institutional investors' role in enhancing market efficiency.
A Review of Component Coupling Metrics for Component-Based Development

The use of component-based software engineering (CBSE) is growing in popularity among the software engineering community and it has been successfully applied in many engineering domains. Component quality evaluations by adequate metrics are needed for large scale project. However, the software quality evaluation should also be performed on component assembly since the overall quality of the CBSE is more important. In this paper, we briefly survey the traditional software metrics and then discuss metrics for both the individual component and their assembly between the components. We then suggest a formal direct and an indirect component coupling metric.
Design of Temperature Measurement System for High Voltage Disconnecting Switch

A kind of temperature measurement system for high voltage disconnecting switch was presented in this paper. The arm chip STM32F103RBT6 which has low power and high performance was adopted as CPU, and the circuit consisted of power supply circuit, temperature measurement circuit, wireless communication circuit and control circuit. This system has been applied in practice and has achieved a good result.
Non-Uniform Node Deployment for Lifetime Extension in Large-Scale Randomly Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Network sensing coverage and network lifetime are the two major performance metrics for WSNs. Different data forwarding/routing mechanisms lead to different amounts and different distributions of energy consumption in a network. Moreover, nodes at different locations will suffer from different message forwarding burdens, either due to the amounts of forwarding messages or due to the required transmission power. In this work, we focus on the node deployment problem for large-scale randomly distributed WSNs, and proposed a non-uniform node deployment strategy, the IFA-based deployment strategy, for the multi-hop routing scenario. The sensing coverage, message forwarding and energy consumption issues are well examined and taken into consideration in our proposed deployment strategy. The iterative algorithm that figures out the optimal node density distribution fitting to the energy consumption distribution has been devised. Simulation results show that the proposed IFA-based deployment strategy can significantly improve the sensing coverage performance of a WSN.
Blur Resistant Image Authentication Method with Pixel-wise Tamper Localization

A new digital signature based method for image authentication and pixel-wise tamper localization is proposed. The proposed method is resistant to image content preserving enhancement operations such as blurring or sharpening. Authentication function is implemented separately from tamper localization both to increase processing speed and to disable algorithmic oracle attack. Ill. 7, bibl. 9 (in English; summaries in English, Russian and Lithuanian).
Tarantula - A Scalable and Extensible Web Spider

Web crawlers today suffer from poor navigation techniques which reduce their scalability while crawling the World Wide Web (WWW). In this paper we present a web crawler named Tarantula that is scalable and fully configurable. The work on Tarantula project was started with the aim of making a simple, elegant and yet an efficient Web Crawler offering better crawling strategies while walking through the WWW. This paper also presents a comparison with the Heritrix (Mohr et al.) crawler. The structure of the crawler facilitates new navigation techniques which can be used with existing techniques to give improved crawl results. Tarantula has a pluggable, extensible architecture that further facilitates customization by the user.
Wavelet based semisupervised learning for satellite image classification using ensemble projection

Image classification techniques play a significant role in the remote sensing imagery. Many of the researchers found some difficulties while doing the analysis of satellite images. During the classification task, many questions have arisen in the minds of the experts and they might face many challenging issues. SSEP (Semi Supervised Ensemble Projection) is a newly adopted method that yields better accuracy even when the satellite image dataset comprises of limited labeled data and great quantity of unlabeled data. Initially, it is common to extract the preliminary features like color, structure, textures for the given image. In this article, we have not only proposed a new Gaussian normal affinity to describe the nearest neighbor by ensemble process in an accurate way which ensures the reliability and diversity, but also we have applied wavelet transformation to texture feature for enhancing the accuracy of classification. Sparse coding technique was mainly meant to overcome the redundancy. The effectiveness of the proposed method is successfully illustrated by using high resolution satellite dataset.
RABID: A Distributed Parallel R for Large Datasets

Large-scale data mining and deep data analysis are increasingly important for both enterprise and scientific applications. Statistical languages provide rich functionality and ease of use for data analysis and modeling and have a large user base. R is one of the most widely used of these languages, but is limited to a single threaded execution model and problem sizes that fit in a single node. This paper describes highly parallel R system called RABID (R Analytics for BIg Data) that maintains R compatibility, leverages the MapReducelike distributed Spark and achieves high performance and scaling across clusters. Our experimental evaluation shows that RABID performs up to 5x faster than Hadoop and 20x faster than RHIPE on two data mining applications.
High Levels of Genomic Aberrations in Serous Ovarian Cancers Are Associated with Better Survival

Genomic instability and copy number alterations in cancer are generally associated with poor prognosis; however, recent studies have suggested that extreme levels of genomic aberrations may be beneficial for the survival outcome for patients with specific tumour types. We investigated the extent of genomic instability in predominantly high-grade serous ovarian cancers (SOC) using two independent datasets, generated in Norway (n = 74) and Australia (n = 70), respectively. Genomic instability was quantified by the Total Aberration Index (TAI), a measure of the abundance and genomic size of copy number changes in a tumour. In the Norwegian cohort, patients with TAI above the median revealed significantly prolonged overall survival (p<0.001) and progression-free survival (p<0.05). In the Australian cohort, patients with above median TAI showed prolonged overall survival (p<0.05) and moderately, but not significantly, prolonged progression-free survival. Results were confirmed by univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses with TAI as a continuous variable. Our results provide further evidence supporting an association between high level of genomic instability and prolonged survival of high-grade SOC patients, possibly as disturbed genome integrity may lead to increased sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents.
Population Growth across Chinese Cities : Urban Land Expansion versus Housing Density Response to Demand Shocks

We study the extent to which responses in urban redevelopment density to demand shocks contribute to population growth, taking into account urban land expansions independent of demand shocks and changes in housing absorption by existing urban households. In the context of Chinese urban growth from 1998 to 2004 when liberalization in urban housing and labor markets significantly elevated labor mobility, we show that the variation in housing density response contributes as much to the cross-city population growth variance as do the variations in urban land expansion and per-capita housing demand growth. Furthermore, we find a number of institutional factors, such as local government efficiency, urban land reform and intra-city income inequality, to have significant influences on the housing-density supply elasticity.
How large are competitive pressures in services markets?: Estimation of mark-ups for selected OECD countries

Mark-ups can provide valuable information on competitive pressures in various sectors of the economy, reflecting pressures stemming from rules of conduct imposed by regulators as well as those arising from such factors as trade and FDI or increasing consumer demands in terms of price and quality. This study estimates mark-ups for services industries in European OECD members and its novelty is that it i) allows for non-constant returns to scale, ii) jointly estimates mark-ups for all sectors and in all countries and iii) estimates mark-ups at a detailed level of sectoral disaggregation. The estimation is done for the period 1993-2006 and uses firm level data of the Amadeus database. In general, the estimated mark-ups are higher for professional services, real estate, renting and utilities, while they tend to be substantially lower for construction, computer services, retail and wholesale trade and catering. There is also large variation across countries in terms of the sizes of the estimated mark-ups. Competitive pressures according to these mark-ups should be large in the United Kingdom and most Scandinavian countries, and relatively small in Central European countries, Sweden and Italy.
Training a real-world POMDP-based Dialog System

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes provide a principled way to model uncertainty in dialogues. However, traditional algorithms for optimising policies are intractable except for cases with very few states. This paper discusses a new approach to policy optimisation based on grid-based Q-learning with a summary of belief space. We also present a technique for bootstrapping the system using a novel agenda-based user model. An implementation of a policy trained using this system was tested with human subjects in an extensive trial. The policy gave highly competitive results, with a 90.6% task completion rate.
The Effect of Current Income on Aggregate Consumption

Using the statistical distributional approach of aggregation by Hildenbrand and Kneip (1999, 2002), this paper attempts to find out to what extent current labour income can explain the relative change in aggregate consumption expenditure. The coefficients of the changes in the income distribution are estimated as an average derivative of the cross-section Engel curve. We use the UK-FES [1974-1993] to estimate these coefficients separately for each year by a nonparametric estimation procedure. It is found that the change in current labour income plays a significant role for the commodity groups services and total nondurable, thereby contradicting the implications of the traditional life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis. For services the inclusion of dispersion in addition to the mean of the income distribution improves the goodness-of-fit of the model.
Dollar Adjustment: How Far? Against What?

Building on the scholarship of the highly successful 2003 volume, Dollar Overvaluation and the World Economy, this book assesses the progress that has been made to date in correcting the sizable misalignments of key national currencies that developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The book examines whether a dollar decline is needed for the United States and the rest of the world to achieve sustainable current account positions and what the impact of a major dollar realignment would be on economies around the world. It also features new ideas on the effectiveness of intervention in moving exchange rates in a desired direction. The book brings together perspectives from government, industry, and academia.
A WWW-based Melody Retrieval System

This paper discusses a system that operates on the WWW and retrieves the song title from the melody of a song. In retrieval from a sung tune, it is not always true that the input melody information (such as pitch and span) is exact. The result of coarse conversion of the input data to the melody information based on thresholds is used as the retrieval key, and the matching to a song in the database is attempted. It has been difficult, however, to define adequate thresholds. In particular, it has been difficult to derive effective retrieval keys for the span. It has also been difficult to make the process converge toward the correct solution by using the coarse information. From such a viewpoint, this study proposes the following two approaches in matching: (1) A method is presented to set optimal thresholds for deriving an effective retrieval key. (2) A matching procedure to restrict precisely the candidates for the correct song from the database song is presented. Retrieval with a higher matching accuracy than in the conventional method is realized, and a system that can be utilized by multiple users on the WWW is constructed. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 85(9): 63–74, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.10073
15‐F2t‐Isoprostane Concentrations and Oxidant Status in Lactating Dairy Cattle with Acute Coliform Mastitis

Background Severe mammary tissue damage during acute coliform mastitis in cattle is partially caused by oxidative stress. Although considered a gold standard biomarker in some human conditions, the utility of 15‐F2t‐Isoprostanes (15‐F2t‐Isop) in detecting oxidative stress in dairy cattle has not been validated. Hypothesis Concentrations of 15‐F2t‐Isop in plasma, urine, and milk correlate with changes in oxidant status during severe coliform mastitis in cattle. Animals Eleven lactating Holstein‐Friesian dairy cows in their 3rd–6th lactation. Methods A case–control study using cows with acute coliform mastitis and matched healthy controls were enrolled into this study. Measures of inflammation, oxidant status, and redox status in plasma and milk samples were quantified using commercial assays. Plasma, urine, and milk 15‐F2t‐Isop were quantified by liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC‐MS/MS) and ELISA assays. Data were analyzed by Wilcoxon rank sum tests (α = 0.05). Results Plasma 15‐F2t‐Isop quantified by LC‐MS/MS was positively correlated with systemic oxidant status (r = 0.83; P = .01). Urine 15‐F2t‐Isop quantified by LC‐MS/MS did not correlate with systemic oxidant status, but was negatively correlated with redox status variables (r = −0.83; P = .01). Milk 15‐F2t‐Isop quantified by LC‐MS/MS was negatively correlated (r = −0.86; P = .007) with local oxidant status. Total 15‐F2t‐Isop in milk quantified by a commercial ELISA (cbELISA) was positively correlated with oxidant status in milk (r = 0.98; P < .001). Conclusions and Clinical Importance Free plasma 15‐F2t‐Isop quantified by LC‐MS/MS and total milk 15‐F2t‐Isop quantified by cbELISA are accurate biomarkers of systemic and mammary gland oxidant status, respectively. Establishing reference intervals for free and total 15‐F2t‐Isops for evaluating oxidative stress in dairy cows should currently be based on the LC‐MS/MS method.
Deadband Sampling in PID Control

The deadband sampling is used in networked control systems to reduce the number of triggered events. This paper discusses the problems by use of deadband sampling in closed control loops. A simplified PID and estimator-based control algorithms dealing with deadband sampling are considered in this paper. The algorithms and different sampling configurations are compared based on extensive simulations with the help of the TrueTime toolbox for Matlab/Simulink.
Design and performance of directory caches for scalable shared memory multiprocessors

Recent research shows that the occupancy of the coherence controllers is a major performance bottleneck for distributed cache coherent shared memory multiprocessors. A significant part of the occupancy is due to the latency of accessing the directory which is usually kept in DRAM memory. Most coherence controller designs that use protocol processors for executing the coherence protocol handlers use the data cache of the protocol processor for caching directory entries along with protocol handler data. Analogously, a fast Directory Cache (DC) can also be used by the hardwired coherence controller designs to minimize directory access time. The paper studies the performance of directory caches using parallel applications from the SPLASH-2 suite. We demonstrate that using a directory cache can result in 40% or more improvement in the execution time of communication intensive applications. We also investigate the various directory cache design parameters: cache size, cache line size, and associativity. Experimental results show that the directory cache size requirements grow sub-linearly with the increase in the application's data set size. The results also show the performance advantage of multi-entry directory cache lines, as a result of spatial locality and the absence of sharing of directories. The impact of the associativity of the directory caches on performance is less than that of the size and the line size. We also find a linear relation between the directory cache miss ratio and the coherence controller occupancy, and between both measures and the execution time of the applications.