Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploiting Same Tag Bits to Improve the Reliability of the Cache Memories

With the trend of increasing transient error rate, it is becoming important to prevent transient errors and provide a correction mechanism for hardware circuits, especially for SRAM cache memories. Caches are the largest structures in current microprocessors and, hence, are most vulnerable to the transient errors. Tag bits in cache memories are also exposed to transient errors but a few efforts have been made to reduce their vulnerability. In this paper, we propose to exploit prevalent same tag bits to improve error protection capability of the tag bits in the caches. When data are fetched from the main memory, it is checked if adjacent cache lines have the same tag bits as those of the data fetched. This same tag bit information is stored in the caches as extra bits to be used later. When an error is detected in the tag bits, the same tag bit information is used to recover from the error in the tag bits. The proposed scheme has small area, energy, and performance overheads with error protection coverage of 97.9% on average. Even with large working sets and various cache sizes, our scheme shows protection coverage of higher than 95% on average.
Method ZAPROS for Multicriteria Alternatives Ranking and the Problem of Incomparability

The new method for the construction of partial order on the set of multicriteria alter- natives is presented. This method belongs to the family of Verbal Decision Analysis methods and gives a more efficient means of problem solution. The method is based on psychologically valid op- erations for information elicitation from a decision maker: comparisons of two distances between the evaluations on the ordinal scales of two criteria. The information received from a decision maker is used for the construction of a binary relation between a pair of alternatives which yields preference, indifference and incomparability relations. The notion of a method decisive power is introduced. The illustrative example is given.
In Vivo and in Vitro Activity And Mechanism Of Action of the Multidrug Cytarabine-L-Glycerylyl-Fluorodeoxyuridine

Multidrugs have the potential to bypass resistance. We investigated the in vitro activity and resistance circumvention of the multidrug cytarabine-L-fluorodeoxyuridine (AraC-L-5FdU), linked via a glycerophospholipid linkage. Cytotoxicity was determined using sensitive (A2780, FM3A/0) and resistant (AG6000, AraC resistant, deoxycytidine kinase deficient; FM3A/TK-, 5FdU resistant, thymidine kinase deficient) cell lines. Circumvention of nucleoside transporter and activating enzymes was determined using specific inhibitors, HPLC analysis and standard radioactivity assays. AraC-L-5FdU was active (IC50: 0.03 μM in both A2780 and FM3A/0), had some activity in AG6000 (IC50: 0.28 μ M), but no activity in FM3A/TK− (IC50: 18.3 μM). AraC-nucleotides were not detected in AG6000. 5FdU-nucleotides were detected in all cell lines. AraC-L-5FdU did not inhibit TS in FM3A/TK− (5%). Since phosphatase/nucleotidase-inhibition reduced cytotoxicity 7–70-fold, cleavage seems to be outside the cell, presumably to nucleotides, and then to nucleosides. The multidrug was orally active in the HT-29 colon carcinoma xenografts which are resistant toward the single drugs.
Measurements of air‐sea gas exchange at high wind speeds in the Southern Ocean: Implications for global parameterizations

The SOLAS Air‐Sea Gas Exchange (SAGE) Experiment was conducted in the western Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean. During SAGE, gas transfer velocities were determined using the 3He/SF6 dual gas tracer technique, and results were obtained at higher wind speeds (16.0 m s−1) than in previous open ocean dual tracer experiments. The results clearly reveal a quadratic relationship between wind speed and gas transfer velocity rather than a recently proposed cubic relationship. A new parameterization between wind speed and gas transfer velocity is proposed, which is consistent with previous 3He/SF6 dual tracer results from the coastal and open ocean obtained at lower wind speeds. This suggests that factors controlling air‐sea gas exchange in this region are similar to those in other parts of the world ocean, and that the parameterization presented here should be applicable to the global ocean.
Concomitant radiotherapy and paclitaxel for high-risk endometrial cancer: first feasibility study.

OBJECTIVE Postoperative radiotherapy (RT) is the most used adjuvant treatment in high risk endometrial cancer (HREC), and it appears to reduce the incidence of pelvic relapses but doesn't seem to improve survival. Paclitaxel (P) has shown in vitro and clinical activity against endometrial cancer, and it is also a potent radiosensitizer by blocking dividing cells in G2/M phase. This is the first study that verifies the feasibility of a treatment with concomitant weekly chemotherapy and RT to potentially reduce the incidence of local and distant relapses in order to improve survival in HREC. PATIENTS AND METHODS Thirteen patients with HREC have entered the feasibility study at San Raphael Hospital University of Milan. All patients underwent total abdominal hysterectomy, bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, and surgical staging. Four patients presented stage IC disease, 2 women had IIB stage tumors, 5 patients revealed IIIA stage disease, and 2 had stage IIIC. The patients received P (60 mg./m(2)) via a continuous 1-h infusion once weekly during the 5 weeks of RT (mean radiation dose of 50.4 Gy). At the end of RT three additional consolidation courses of P (80 mg/m(2)) were subministered. Eleven patients received only pelvic irradiation; in 2 cases radiotherapy was performed on an extended field. RESULTS Eleven of the 13 enrolled patients have completed the radiochemotherapy regimen. A total of 100 courses of P were performed. All patients completed the RT. Adverse effects were evaluated. Hematological toxicity was mild: four cycles (4%) were delayed 1 week because of grade 1 neutropenia. No severe thrombocytopenia was identified. No hemotrasfusions were performed. One cycle was delayed for fever. Gastrointestinal adverse effects were observed in 2 patients, in which the cycles were delayed 1 week because of diarrhea. One cycle was delayed 1 week because of dermatitis. One patient developed a subocclusion 8 weeks after the end of the treatment, with medical resolution. No patients developed hypersensitivity reactions. CONCLUSIONS Concomitant P and RT is safe and acceptable treatment in patients with HREC. Prospective clinical studies are necessary to evaluate the benefits of this regimen for the long-term survival rate.
Visual Script and Language Identification

In this paper we introduce a script identification method based on hand-crafted texture features and an artificial neural network. The proposed pipeline achieves near state-of-the-art performance for script identification of video-text and state-of-the-art performance on visual language identification of handwritten text. More than using the deep network as a classifier, the use of its intermediary activations as a learned metric demonstrates remarkable results and allows the use of discriminative models on unknown classes. Comparative experiments in video-text and text in the wild datasets provide insights on the internals of the proposed deep network.
Sigma Set : A Small Second Order Statistical Region Descriptor

Given an image region of pixels, second order statistics can be used to construct a descriptor for object representation. One example is the covariance matrix descriptor, which shows high discriminative power and good robustness in many computer vision applications. However, operations for the covariance matrix on Riemannian manifolds are usually computationally demanding. This paper proposes a novel second order statistics based region descriptor, named "Sigma Set", in the form of a small set of vectors, which can be uniquely constructed through Cholesky decomposition on the covariance matrix. Sigma Set is of low dimension, powerful and robust. Moreover, compared with the covariance matrix, Sigma Set is not only more efficient in distance evaluation and average calculation, but also easier to be enriched with first order statistics. Experimental results in texture classification and object tracking verify the effectiveness and efficiency of this novel object descriptor.
Persistence and tracking: Putting vehicles and trajectories in context

City-scale tracking of all objects visible in a camera network or aerial video surveillance is an important tool in surveillance and traffic monitoring. We propose a framework for human guided tracking based on explicitly considering the context surrounding the urban multi-vehicle tracking problem. This framework is based on a standard (but state of the art) probabilistic tracking model. Our contribution is to explicitly detail where human annotation of the scene (e.g. “this is a lane”), a track (e.g. “this track is bad”), or a pair of tracks (e.g. “these two tracks are confused”) can be naturally integrated within the probabilistic tracking framework. For an early prototype system, we offer results and examples from a dense urban traffic camera network tracking, querying data with thousands of vehicles over 30 minutes.
Biogeochemical cycling of PCBs in lakes of variable trophic status: A paired‐lake experiment

A paired whole‐lake experiment was conducted on two remote, atmospherically driven lakes in the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) to examine the stresses of trophic condition on air‐water exchange and settling fluxes of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Lake 227 (L227) and Lake 110 (L110) are similar in volume, surface area, and watershed area but differ significantly in trophic status. The two lakes have similar access to atmospheric PCBs but eutrophic L227 may exhibit enhanced air to water exchange due to greater biotic uptake of dissolved PCBs. Settling fluxes of PCB were significantly greater in eutrophic L227 (40 ng m−2 d‐1 in 1993; 29 ng m‐2 d‐1 in 1994) than in oligotrophic L110 (22 ng m‐2 d‐1 in 1993 and 17 ng m‐2 d‐1 in 1994). Dissolved ΣPCB concentrations were not significantly different in the two lakes (∼0.3 ng liter‐1). Greater ΣPCB settling fluxes in L227 vs. L110 coupled with similar dissolved concentrations after June supports the hypothesis that air‐water exchange supports the water column PCB concentrations. Surprisingly, ΣPCB fugacity gradients in both lakes indicated that net volatilization dominated during the entire ice‐free period, requiring another source. A ΣPCB mass budget in the epilimnion of each lake over the stratified period showed that the major PCB losses were due to settling and volatilization. ΣPCB settling losses were 2.4 times greater in L227 than in L110 due to higher settling particle fluxes. The mass budgets suggest that the major PCB input to these remote lakes is from the watershed.
IRGS: Image Segmentation Using Edge Penalties and Region Growing

This paper proposes an image segmentation method named iterative region growing using semantics (IRGS), which is characterized by two aspects. First, it uses graduated increased edge penalty (GIEP) functions within the traditional Markov random field (MRF) context model in formulating the objective functions. Second, IRGS uses a region growing technique in searching for the solutions to these objective functions. The proposed IRGS is an improvement over traditional MRF based approaches in that the edge strength information is utilized and a more stable estimation of model parameters is achieved. Moreover, the IRGS method provides the possibility of building a hierarchical representation of the image content, and allows various region features and even domain knowledge to be incorporated in the segmentation process. The algorithm has been successfully tested on several artificial images and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images.
Optimal MEMS device for mobility and zeta potential measurements using DC electrophoresis

We have developed a novel microchannel geometry that allows us to perform simple DC electrophoresis to measure the electrophoretic mobility and zeta potential of analytes and particles. In standard capillary geometries, mobility measurements using DC fields are difficult to perform. Specifically, measurements in open capillaries require knowledge of the hard to measure and often dynamic wall surface potential. Although measurements in closed capillaries eliminate this requirement, the measurements must be performed at infinitesimally small regions of zero flow where the pressure driven‐flow completely cancels the electroosmotic flow (Komagata Planes). Furthermore, applied DC fields lead to electrode polarization, further questioning the reliability and accuracy of the measurement. In contrast, our geometry expands and moves the Komagata planes to where velocity gradients are at a minimum, and thus knowledge of the precise location of a Komagata plane is not necessary. Additionally, our microfluidic device prevents electrode polarization because of fluid recirculation around the electrodes. We fabricated our device using standard MEMS fabrication techniques and performed electrophoretic mobility measurements on 500 nm fluorescently tagged polystyrene particles at various buffer concentrations. Results are comparable to two different commercial dynamic light scattering based particle sizing instruments. We conclude with guidelines to further develop this robust electrophoretic tool that allows for facile and efficient particle characterization.
Evidence of a Causal Relationship Between Adiponectin Levels and Insulin Sensitivity

The adipocyte-secreted protein adiponectin is associated with insulin sensitivity in observational studies. We aimed to evaluate whether this relationship is causal using a Mendelian randomization approach. In a sample of Swedish men aged 71 years (n = 942) from the Uppsala Longitudinal Study of Adult Men (ULSAM), insulin sensitivity (M/I ratio) was measured by the euglycemic insulin clamp. We used three genetic variants in the ADIPOQ locus as instrumental variables (IVs) to estimate the potential causal effect of adiponectin on insulin sensitivity and compared these with results from conventional linear regression. The three ADIPOQ variants, rs17300539, rs3774261, and rs6444175, were strongly associated with serum adiponectin levels (all P ≤ 5.3 × 10−9) and were also significantly associated with M/I ratio in the expected direction (all P ≤ 0.022). IV analysis confirmed that genetically determined adiponectin increased insulin sensitivity (β = 0.47–0.81, all P ≤ 0.014) comparable with observational estimates (β = 0.50, all Pdifference ≥ 0.136). Adjustment for BMI and waist circumference partly explained the association of both genetically determined and observed adiponectin levels with insulin sensitivity. The observed association between higher adiponectin levels and increased insulin sensitivity is likely to represent a causal relationship partly mediated by reduced adiposity.
Improving Semantic Parsing with Enriched Synchronous Context-Free Grammar

Semantic parsing maps a sentence in natural language into a structured meaning representation. Previous studies show that semantic parsing with synchronous context-free grammars (SCFGs) achieves favorable performance over most other alternatives. Motivated by the observation that the performance of semantic parsing with SCFGs is closely tied to the translation rules, this article explores to extend translation rules with high quality and increased coverage in three ways. First, we examine the difference between word alignments for semantic parsing and statistical machine translation (SMT) to better adapt word alignment in SMT to semantic parsing. Second, we introduce both structure and syntax informed nonterminals, better guiding the parsing in favor of well-formed structure, instead of using a uninformed nonterminal in SCFGs. Third, we address the unknown word translation issue via synthetic translation rules. Last but not least, we use a filtering approach to improve performance via predicting answer type. Evaluation on the standard GeoQuery benchmark dataset shows that our approach greatly outperforms the state of the art across various languages, including English, Chinese, Thai, German, and Greek.
ZONAL ELECTROPHORESIS OF THE SOLUBLE PROTEINS OF LIVER AND TUMOR IN AZO DYE CARCINOGENESIS.

Summary A procedure has been developed for the zonal electrophoretic resolution of the soluble proteins of rat liver with the use of a modified Porath column of ethanolyzed cellulose. The mild method, with 750 mg. or less of protein, has been applied to various studies. An initial degree of resolution reproducibly separates the soluble liver proteins into all their principal charge classes with high recovery. Further electrophoretic expansion achieves a very high degree of resolution of the subcomponents of the relatively basic ( h ) proteins. The method has been applied to the separation of the soluble liver proteins of normal rats and those fed the strongly hepatocarcinogenic 3′-methyl-4-dimethylaminoazobenzene (3′-Me-DAB), the weakly carcinogenic 4′-methyl-4-dimethylaminoazobenzene, the noncarcinogenic 2-methyl-4-dimethylaminoazobenzene, or the control diet. The azoprotein profiles of whole extracts and their h subcomponents are also presented. Azo metabolites are bound to the soluble liver proteins with a relatively high degree of specificity. The carcinogens produce more of the principal azoprotein (slow h 2 ) than does the noncarcinogen. The degree of electrophoretic homogeneity of this azoprotein matches those of certain species of individual enzymes, suggesting a single function for its normal protein analog. In addition to the slow h 2 , there exist two small families of soluble azoproteins, one of which appears to be ribonucleoazoproteins in which dye is bound to the protein moeity, rather than to nucleic acid. Profiles of the soluble liver ribonucleoproteins are also presented, showing that they are localized in one electrophoretic class. The soluble proteins of rat liver tumors induced by feeding 3′-Me-DAB have likewise been zonally resolved. The amount of the relatively basic ( h ) proteins, in particular the slow h 2 , is markedly reduced in tumor compared with that of normal and azo preneoplastic livers. In contrast to the preneoplastic liver, proteins of the tumor have no covalently bound azo dyes (Miller and Miller). In extension of that finding, the various soluble tumor proteins contain only very small quantities of loosely combined dyes. In particular, the small amount of h 2 proteins present has only a trace of such, if any. Finally, this report summarizes the various parallel involvements of the h 2 proteins of rat liver in hepatocarcinogenesis by aminoazo dyes and by 2-acetylaminofluorene, and of the h 2 -like proteins of mouse skin in skin carcinogenesis by polycyclic hydrocarbons.
INFLUENCE OF DIPHENYLOXIDE DISULFONATE SURFACTANTS ON BIODEGRADATION OF HYDROCARBONS

Testing was conducted with anionic diphenyloxide disulfonate (DPDS) surfactants (C12 and C16 alkyl moieties) with naphthalene in aqueous systems and phenanthrene in soil systems to investigate the influence of these surfactants on biodegradation of hydrocarbons. A potential for enhancement in the degradation of naphthalene was seen in C12-DPDS amended assays at low surfactant concentrations, predominately below the critical micelle concentration (CMC). The overall trend for both C12and C16-DPDS assays indicated decreasing efficiency in degradation of naphthalene with increasing surfactant concentration, with no correlation to the CMCs. In the soil-slurry assays, surfactant-free controls and assays with the lowest (sub-CMC) surfactant additions demonstrated the first phenanthrene mineralization responses followed by the mid-level (sub-CMC) surfactant-amended assays. Approximately 3 months later, a supra-CMC C12-DPDS sample had a strong response. In saturated soil (mud) systems, mineralization only occurred in the surfactant-free controls and in assays with the lowest (sub-CMC) additions during 5 months of testing. The lowest surfactant additions, however, were effective in enhancing mineralization of phenanthrene, with the first-order constant for the C12-DPDS amended assays being increased by a factor of 5 over that of the surfactant-free controls.
Application of Locality Sensitive Hashing to realtime loop closure detection

In this work we present a new approach for detecting loop closures in a real-time online setting. The Loop Closure Detection problem is important in visual SLAM applications and different approaches exist to deal with this problem. Most of these approaches are based on the Bag-of-Words approach, and assume a fixed visual vocabulary can work in different types of environments. However BOW is known to introduce perceptual aliasing. By using Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) we are able to compute image similarity and detect loop closures by using visual features directly without vector quantization as in BOW and also LSH does not require a prior visual vocabulary. We show the effectiveness of our approach empirically by comparing it to the Bag of Words (BOW) approach which is the dominant method of selecting candidate loop closing images. Our method is fast enough for realtime applications and its accuracy is significantly better than the BOW approach.
From Policy to Practice: Implementation of the Legislative Objectives of Charter Schools

Key legislative objectives of charter schools are to provide more school and classroom options, increase teacher influence over decision making, and increase school autonomy from state and district policy. Using national data from the 2003–4 School and Staffing Survey, we found that charter schools attained these legislative objectives when compared with regular schools, although increases in teacher influence and school autonomy were modest. Although charter schools have been implemented much as intended by legislation, other research has shown that charter schools in general have not improved student achievement—a major objective of charter school legislation. Our results suggest that this cannot be attributed to a failure to implement the charter school concept with respect to the legislative objectives examined.
Cofactoring and Dimerization of Proteinase-Activated Receptors

Proteinase-activated receptors (PARs) are G protein–coupled receptors that transmit cellular responses to extracellular proteases and have important functions in vascular physiology, development, inflammation, and cancer progression. The established paradigm for PAR activation involves proteolytic cleavage of the extracellular N terminus, which reveals a new N terminus that functions as a tethered ligand by binding intramolecularly to the receptor to trigger transmembrane signaling. Most cells express more than one PAR, which can influence the mode of PAR activation and signaling. Clear examples include murine PAR3 cofactoring of PAR4 and transactivation of PAR2 by PAR1. Thrombin binds to and cleaves murine PAR3, which facilitates PAR4 cleavage and activation. This process is essential for thrombin signaling and platelet activation, since murine PAR3 cannot signal alone. Although PAR1 and PAR4 are both competent to signal, PAR1 is able to act as a cofactor for PAR4, facilitating more rapid cleavage and activation by thrombin. PAR1 can also facilitate PAR2 activation through a different mechanism. Cleavage of the PAR1 N terminus by thrombin generates a tethered ligand domain that can bind intermolecularly to PAR2 to activate signaling. Thus, PARs can regulate each other’s activity by localizing thrombin when in complex with PAR3 and PAR4 or by cleaved PAR1, providing its tethered ligand domain for PAR2 activation. The ability of PARs to cofactor or transactivate other PARs would necessitate that the two receptors be in close proximity, likely in the form of a heterodimer. Here, we discuss the cofactoring and dimerization of PARs and the functional consequences on signaling.