Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A New Approach to Hierarchical and Statistical Timing Simulations

This paper describes a new approach for timing analysis in general and, more specifically, for statistical timing analysis. A methodology based upon the utilization of the design hierarchy for circuit partitioning and building of the simulation hierarchy was developed. The logic and timing behaviors of the blocks resulting from the partitioning are dissociated and modeled separately. The logic model is represented by an equivalent finite state machine while an automated characterization process extracts the timing data from multiple circuit simulations in order to build a parametric timing model. These models provide the basis of an event-driven hierarchical timing simulator which can be used as a stand-alone tool but also as a front end for statistical timing analyses. Both the nominal and the statistical simulators have been implemented within STAT! (Statistical Timing Analysis Tool), and the results obtained for a few test cases are presented here.
Commentary Cognitive neuroscience of ownership and agency q

1. IntroductionThe paper by Tsakiris et al. reviews an important series of recent studies that have investigated body own-ership and agency using techniques from experimental psychology and neuroimaging. The reviewed data high-light the importance of multisensory as well as sensori-motor signals for both phenomena and tackle thefascinating issue of how humans’ everyday (mostly unconscious) bodily experiences of ownership and agencyhave been correlated with behavior and neural activation in controlled experiments. This is complemented byan introduction to important philosophical issues raised by the neuroscience of ownership and agency. Thepaper also reviews recent ﬁndings on the related topic of self-other discrimination. In what follows we havefocussed on open questions for future research that seem important in order to build a cognitive scienceand cognitive neuroscience of bodily experience as well as bodily perception and cognition.2. Towards neurobiological deﬁnitionsTsakiris et al. review evidence that suggests that ownership and agency are pre-reﬂective experiences thatare likely to be generated by low-level sensori-motor processes. But how exactly are ownership and agencyproduced by these processes? What are the underlying neural mechanisms and their dynamical and computa-tional principles? What are the neurological conditions where these processes break down? We note that atpresent ownership and agency are far from being well-deﬁned concepts. Despite the importance of recenteﬀorts reviewed by Tsakiris et al. (2007), we believe phenomena both need to be further deﬁned in behavioraland neurobiological terms, as in the case of visual perception. It seems well grounded that a combination ofaﬀerent sensory signals and eﬀerent motor signals, as Tsakiris et al. suggest, are important sources for bothphenomena, yet predicted and actual sensory feedback, as well as prediction error signals will likely haveto be included as well. The lack of detailed computational models of ownership and agency formulated interms of aﬀerent sensory and eﬀerent motor signals further complicates their anchoring to neuronal activa-tions as measured in neuroimaging studies, although the review has indicated several interesting directions.
Low Temperature Properties of Finite Dimensional Ising Spin Glasses : (some) Numerical Simulations

We review some recent results on finite dimensional spin glasses by studying recent numerical simulations and their relationship with experiments. In particular we will show results obtained at zero and non zero temperature, focusing in the low temperature properties of the model, and contrast them with different pictures of the low temperature phase of spin glasses: Replica Symmetry Breaking, Droplet Model and Trivial-Not-Trivial Scenario.
Reappraising the Surgical Approach on the Perforated Gastroduodenal Ulcer: Should Gastric Resection Be Abandoned?

Background Advancements in medical care for peptic ulcer disease (PUD) have reduced the need for invasive surgical procedures such as gastric resection (GR). Community-based PUD studies from a large sampling of PUD patients designed to analyze hospital resource use and outcomes after different surgical procedures have been rare. We aimed to exhaustively reappraise the risk factors and patient demographics that affect PUD patient recoveries after GR compared to those after simple closure (SC). Methods We used a Japanese administrative database for 6 consecutive months each year between 2006 and 2010. The database included a total of 68,432 PUD patients; we analyzed 6,334 perforation cases and 3,148 cases of patients who underwent GR or SC. Study variables were demographics, comorbidities, characteristics of PUD, and operative day. Study outcomes that were analyzed included mortality, postoperative complications, ventilation administration, postoperative blood transfusions, length of stay, total charges, operating room (OR) time, and the postoperative fasting period (defined as the day of surgery to the day oral food intake was resumed.) To reduce selection bias in study procedures and to control the variation in hospital practice, a propensity score (PS) matching cohort analysis and a mixed linear regression model were used to assess the effects of GR on the outcomes. Results In 699 hospitals, 322 GRs and 2,826 SCs were observed. Younger age, duodenal ulcers, preexisting anemia and an operative day no more than 24hours were significant associated with the choice of SCs. No significant differences were observed in study outcomes after either GR or SC; more postoperative blood transfusions and longer OR times but shorter postoperative fasting periods were observed after GR. Longer OR times, ventilation and postoperative blood transfusion were significantly associated with mortality. Not GR but longer OR times use of ventilation and complications were the most significant indicators of increased resource use. Conclusions There were no major significant differences in GR when compared to SC with regards to patient recoveries. Surgeons should obtain the skills and establish strategies to optimize either type of surgical procedure including minimizing OR time and establishing the best perioperative critical care. Keywords Peptic ulcer perforation; Simple closure; Gastric resection; Outcome; Resource use
Where did the governments go wrong ?

Privatization has exposed previously state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to prospects of shutdown by multinationals and domestic buyers. We determine whether foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) have a higher propensity to shutdown SOEs as compared to domestic non-MNEs. Using data on Central and Eastern Europe, we nd that SOEs owned by MNEs have signi cantly reduced probability of shutdown; these results hold even after controlling for rm characteristics that reduce the probability of shutdown. Our ndings show that MNEs are not "footloose" in transition economies as they have been found to be in developed and developing countries. Our results suggest that MNEs behave di¤erently towards SOEs and non-SOEs, and in di¤erent markets. We also note that SOEs taken over by MNEs experience higher levels of productivity than SOEs acquired by non-MNEs. We hope that governments going through privatization can learn from our ndings and apply them in divesting state assets. Keywords: shutdown, privatization, multinational rms, cross-border acquisition, state-owned enterprises JEL classi cation paper: D21, D82, F22, F23, L22, P31 yGraduate Student, Department of Economics, University of Colorado at Boulder, 256 UCB, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0256. email: pac@colorado.edu
Realized Volatility, Liquidity, and Corporate Yield Spreads

I propose a friction measure of bond round-trip liquidity costs that is robust to outliers and accounts for the idiosyncratic information behind trading decisions. Particularly effective with investment-grade bonds, the proposed measure displays properties consistent with the credit risk puzzle. Using transactions from January 2004 to December 2011, I find that liquidity costs display a strong correlation with credit conditions and peaked during the subprime crisis. After controlling for equity volatility with high-frequency measures, liquidity costs explain a substantial fraction of the variation in the yield spreads of highly rated bonds, but become less important for speculative-grade bonds.
Pain Related Cortical Oscillations: Methodological Advances and Potential Applications

Alongside the time-locked event-related potentials (ERPs), nociceptive somatosensory inputs can induce modulations of ongoing oscillations, appeared as event-related synchronization or desynchronization (ERS/ERD) in different frequency bands. These ERD/ERS activities are suggested to reflect various aspects of pain perception, including the representation, encoding, assessment, and integration of the nociceptive sensory inputs, as well as behavioral responses to pain, even the precise details of their roles remain unclear. Previous studies investigating the functional relevance of ERD/ERS activities in pain perception were normally done by assessing their latencies, frequencies, magnitudes, and scalp distributions, which would be then correlated with subjective pain perception or stimulus intensity. Nevertheless, these temporal, spectral, and spatial profiles of stimulus induced ERD/ERS could only partly reveal the dynamics of brain oscillatory activities. Indeed, additional parameters, including but not limited to, phase, neural generator, and cross frequency couplings, should be paid attention to comprehensively and systemically evaluate the dynamics of oscillatory activities associated with pain perception and behavior. This would be crucial in exploring the psychophysiological mechanisms of neural oscillation, and in understanding the neural functions of cortical oscillations involved in pain perception and behavior. Notably, some chronic pain (e.g., neurogenic pain and complex regional pain syndrome) patients are often associated with the occurrence of abnormal synchronized oscillatory brain activities, and selectively modulating cortical oscillatory activities has been showed to be a potential therapy strategy to relieve pain with the application of neurostimulation techniques, e.g., repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). Thus, the investigation of the oscillatory activities proceeding from phenomenology to function, opens new perspectives to address questions in human pain psychophysiology and pathophysiology, thereby promoting the establishment of rational therapeutic strategy.
Localising faults in test execution traces

With the advent of agile processes and their emphasis on continuous integration, automated tests became the prominent driver of the development process. When one of the thousands of tests fails, the corresponding fault should be localised as quickly as possible as development can only proceed when the fault is repaired. In this paper we propose a heuristic named SPEQTRA which mines the execution traces of a series of passing and failing tests, to localise the class which contains the fault. SPEQTRA produces ranking of classes that indicates the likelihood of classes to be at fault. We compare our spectrum based fault localisation heuristic with the state of the art (AMPLE) and demonstrate on a small yet representative case (NanoXML) that the ranking of classes proposed by SPEQTRA is significantly better than the one of AMPLE.
User-based Question Recommendation for Question Answering System

An approach to automatically recommending question based on user-word model is proposed. We first employ language modeling approach to map the relationship between a user and a question into the relationship between the user and words in the question. A use-word model is then designed to reveal and quantify the affinity relationship between users and words in the corpus. In the recommendation model, a new question is assigned to users based on the evaluation of question-user relationship. The user who has the strongest relationship with the question is recommended to answer the question. We also implement an incremental update model which can dynamically maintain the user-word model. 216,563 questions (spreading into 30 categories) from Yahoo! Answers are collected as dataset and preliminary experiments show our approach achieves question recommendation accuracy by 85.2%, which exceeds baseline methods.
Distributed compression for the uplink channel of a coordinated cellular networkwith a backhaul constraint

We propose distributed compression for the uplink channel of a backhaul-constrained coordinated cellular network. In the network, N multiple-antenna base stations compress their received signals using a distributed Wyner-Ziv code, and then send the compressed vectors to a central BS, which centralizes decoding. For a single-user network, the compression codes at the BSs are optimized in this paper, considering the userpsilas achievable rate as the performance metric.
A survey of application-layer multicast protocols

In light of the slow deployment of IP Multicast technology on the global Internet and the explosive popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications, there has been a flurry of research activities investigating the feasibility of implementing multicasting capability at the application layer, referred to as Application Layer Multicasting (ALM), and numerous algorithms and protocols have been proposed. This article aims to provide researchers in the field with an understanding of ALM protocols by identifying significant characteristics, from both application requirements and networking points of view, and by using those characteristics as a basis for organizing the protocols into an integrated and well-structured format. Current trends and directions for further research are also presented. This article surveys the literature over the period 1995¿2005 on different application layer multicasting approaches.
A continuous evolutionary simulation model of the attainability of honest signalling equilibria

A particular game-theoretic model (Grafen, 1990) of the evolutionary stability of honest signalling, which attempts a formal proof of the validity of Zahavi's (1975, 1977) handicap principle, is generalised and rendered as an evolutionary simulation model. In addition to supporting new theoretical results, this allows the eeects of diiering initial conditions on the attainability of signalling equilibria to be explored. Furthermore, it allows an examination of the manner in which the character of equilibrium signalling behaviour varies with the model's parameters. It is demonstrated that (i) non-handicap signalling equilibria exist, (ii) honest signalling equilibria need not involve extravagant signals, and (iii) the basins of attraction for such equilibria are, however, relatively small. General conditions for the existence of honest signalling equilibria (which replace those ooered by Zahavi) are provided, and it is demonstrated that previous theoretical results are easily accommodated by these general conditions. It is concluded that the supposed generality of the handicap principle, and the coherence of its terminology, are both suspect. Abstract A particular game-theoretic model (Grafen, 1990) of the evolutionary stability of honest signalling, which attempts a formal proof of the validity of Zahavi's (1975, 1977) handicap principle, is generalised and rendered as an evolutionary simulation model. In addition to supporting new theoretical results, this allows the eeects of diiering initial conditions on the attainability of signalling equilibria to be explored. Furthermore, it allows an examination of the manner in which the character of equilibrium signalling behaviour varies with the model's parameters. It is demonstrated that (i) non-handicap signalling equilibria exist, (ii) honest signalling equilibria need not involve extravagant signals, and (iii) the basins of attraction for such equilibria are, however, relatively small. General conditions for the existence of honest signalling equilibria (which replace those ooered by Zahavi) are provided, and it is demonstrated that previous theoretical results are easily accommodated by these general conditions. It is concluded that the supposed generality of the handicap principle, and the coherence of its terminology, are both suspect.
Markov chain Monte Carlo method and its application

The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, as a computer-intensive statistical tool, has enjoyed an enormous upsurge in interest over the last few years. This paper provides a simple, comprehensive and tutorial review of some of the most common areas of research in this field. We begin by discussing how MCMC algorithms can be constructed from standard building-blocks to produce Markov chains with the desired stationary distribution. We also motivate and discuss more complex ideas that have been proposed in the literature, such as continuous time and dimension jumping methods. We discuss some implementational issues associated with MCMC methods. We take a look at the arguments for and against multiple replications, consider how long chains should be run for and how to determine suitable starting points. We also take a look at graphical models and how graphical approaches can be used to simplify MCMC implementation. Finally, we present a couple of examples, which we use as case-studies to highlight some of the points made earlier in the text. In particular, we use a simple changepoint model to illustrate how to tackle a typical Bayesian modelling problem via the MCMC method, before using mixture model problems to provide illustrations of good sampler output and of the implementation of a reversible jump MCMC algorithm.
Polar Redistribution of the Sialoglycoprotein CD43: Implications for T Cell Function1

Contact between T cells and APCs results in the orchestrated segregation of molecules at the cell-cell interface and formation of a specialized structure termed the immunological synapse. This model predicts the topological seclusion of large molecules such as CD43 from the site of closest contact between the T cell and APC, allowing for the close apposition of cell membranes and effective TCR engagement. Similarly, during T cell migration segregation of CD43 to the uropod is thought to aid integrin adhesion at the leading edge of the cell by removing steric hindrance. We show in this work that CD43 distribution on T cells is regulated by a membrane proximal ezrin binding site and that failure to displace CD43 from the immunological synapse has no inhibitory effects on primary T cell activation. We also report that CD43 expression at the contact zone between T cells and matrix does not negatively regulate motility but may regulate LFA-1 de-adhesion. These results suggest that the steric barrier model of CD43 is inadequate and that alternative mechanisms account for the negative regulatory properties of CD43.
A fast and efficient backup routing scheme with bounded delay guarantees

Reliable transmission is essential for several real-time applications. Backup channels introduce the notion of availability at the cost of increasing the use of network resources. However, this over provisioning of resources is potentially wasted, since packet delays are usually lower than the required end-to-end channel delay. The goal of this paper is to present a new scheme for obtaining the primary and backup paths maximizing the admission of channel in a network. This paper uses a new failure detection scheme for selecting the primary and backup paths denominated proactive backup channel. This scheme is based on activating the backup channel before a fail is produced. The experiments show that using this new scheme the admission rate (the number of channels a network can accept) is improved considerably. The paper also presents the application of this scheme to IP networks using TCP trunking
i-cisTarget: an integrative genomics method for the prediction of regulatory features and cis-regulatory modules

The field of regulatory genomics today is characterized by the generation of high-throughput data sets that capture genome-wide transcription factor (TF) binding, histone modifications, or DNAseI hypersensitive regions across many cell types and conditions. In this context, a critical question is how to make optimal use of these publicly available datasets when studying transcriptional regulation. Here, we address this question in Drosophila melanogaster for which a large number of high-throughput regulatory datasets are available. We developed i-cisTarget (where the ‘i’ stands for integrative), for the first time enabling the discovery of different types of enriched ‘regulatory features’ in a set of co-regulated sequences in one analysis, being either TF motifs or ‘in vivo’ chromatin features, or combinations thereof. We have validated our approach on 15 co-expressed gene sets, 21 ChIP data sets, 628 curated gene sets and multiple individual case studies, and show that meaningful regulatory features can be confidently discovered; that bona fide enhancers can be identified, both by in vivo events and by TF motifs; and that combinations of in vivo events and TF motifs further increase the performance of enhancer prediction.
Green IT Adoption: A Motivational Perspective

Although there is need for information systems (IS) empirical research that study the factors influencing the adoption of green technologies, most, if not all, of the published IS research on either Green IT or Green IS are characterized by a call for action to the IS community and a definition of the Green IS research and teaching agenda. This paper empirically investigates the influence of organizational eco-sustainability motivations on the adoption of Green IT. Drawing from the motivational theory and using data collected from a survey of 176 organizations, the paper develops and tests four hypotheses. The result shows that eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness motives influence the adoption of technologies that improve the energy efficiency of IT infrastructure and subsequent pollution reduction. They also explain variations in the adoption of policy and practices that aim to improve product stewardship of the IT lifecycle from procurement to end of life management. We highlight some of the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.