Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High speed thermal coupling measurements for multichip electro-thermal model validation

A previously developed measurement method suitable for extracting transient thermal data for short term (100us-1s), high power, heating conditions was used to validate electro thermal models of multichip modules containing IGBTs in [1]. This work extends this technique for validation of thermal coupling behavior within multichip modules containing both IGBTs and MOSFETs for soft switching inverter topologies. By using the device threshold voltage as a time dependent temperature sensitive parameter (TSP), the thermal transient of a single device, along with the thermal coupling effect among nearby devices sharing common direct bond copper (DBC) substrates, can be studied under a variety of pulsed power conditions. Heating transients are made independently to a single device and the TSP of neighboring devices is monitored to determine if thermal coupling exists. The previously developed electro-thermal model in [9] has been modified to include chip to chip coupling effects and validated using the new double TSP method.
Postnatal microbial colonization programs the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal system for stress response in mice

Indigenous microbiota have several beneficial effects on host physiological functions; however, little is known about whether or not postnatal microbial colonization can affect the development of brain plasticity and a subsequent physiological system response. To test the idea that such microbes may affect the development of neural systems that govern the endocrine response to stress, we investigated hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) reaction to stress by comparing germfree (GF), specific pathogen free (SPF) and gnotobiotic mice. Plasma ACTH and corticosterone elevation in response to restraint stress was substantially higher in GF mice than in SPF mice, but not in response to stimulation with ether. Moreover, GF mice also exhibited reduced brain‐derived neurotrophic factor expression levels in the cortex and hippocampus relative to SPF mice. The exaggerated HPA stress response by GF mice was reversed by reconstitution with Bifidobacterium infantis. In contrast, monoassociation with enteropathogenic Escherichia coli, but not with its mutant strain devoid of the translocated intimin receptor gene, enhanced the response to stress. Importantly, the enhanced HPA response of GF mice was partly corrected by reconstitution with SPF faeces at an early stage, but not by any reconstitution exerted at a later stage, which therefore indicates that exposure to microbes at an early developmental stage is required for the HPA system to become fully susceptible to inhibitory neural regulation. These results suggest that commensal microbiota can affect the postnatal development of the HPA stress response in mice.
Can Economics Be Founded on ‘Indisputable Facts of Experience’? Lionel Robbins and the Pioneers of Neoclassical Economics

Robbins argues that the fundamental propositions of microeconomic theory are deductions from the assumption that individuals act on consistent preferences; this ‘indisputable fact of experience’ does not need to be validated in controlled experiments. While recognising that some neoclassical pioneers based the theory on psychological hedonism, Robbins claims that his own approach of ‘pure theory’ belongs to a parallel and sounder tradition exemplified by Menger and Wicksteed. This paper argues that Robbins' methodological defence of pure theory is incoherent, and that his claim to find an intellectual lineage in the works of Menger and Wicksteed overlooks important discontinuities.
The Effect of Export Composition on Economic Growth: The Case of Korea

This article investigates the causal relationship between export composition and economic growth, among others, in the case of a strongly outward-oriented country, i.e. Korea. The cointegration tests show that cointegrating vectors exist among the concerned variables. Also, the error correction model indicates that there is a bidirectional causality between export composition and economic growth. That is, the increasing ratio of non-textile exports to textile exports has led to higher economic growth and vice versa. The empirical results remain qualitatively the same even when we include a measure of trade liberalization as one of the explanatory variables that may affect economic growth.
KlickLabs at TREC 2018 Precision Medicine track

Precision medicine aims to provide the most accurate course of treatment, personalized for each patient. The 2018 Precision Medicine (PM) track aims to build systems, that sift through biomedical articles to ﬁnd relevant cancer treatments for patients, as well as search for clinical trials for which a patient might be eligible. Cancer, as a disease, can occur in various forms, be of different types, and affect multiple organs as well as bodily systems. Additionally, every patient–cancer combination presents with slight variations depending on genetics, age, sex, and other factors. As of 2017, 16% of PubMed articles related to cancer [5], and over 500,000 articles are added to PubMed each year, thereby, making quality information retrieval for PM an important problem to tackle, for the beneﬁt of doctors and patients alike. In this work, we develop query-expansion methods, with an aim to compare their performance over the 2018 PM task. Our experiments indicate that medical ontology (NCIt) based expansion performs well for retrieving scientiﬁc abstracts from PubMed. Utilizing demographic information in queries improves the performance for clinical trial retrieval.
Phylogenetic relationships and morphological evolution in Lentinus, Polyporellus and Neofavolus, emphasizing southeastern Asian taxa

The genus Lentinus (Polyporaceae, Basidiomycota) is widely documented from tropical and temperate forests and is taxonomically controversial. Here we studied the relationships between Lentinus subg. Lentinus sensu Pegler (i.e. sections Lentinus, Tigrini, Dicholamellatae, Rigidi, Lentodiellum and Pleuroti and polypores that share similar morphological characters). We generated sequences of internal transcribed spacers (ITS) and partial 28S regions of nuc rDNA and genes encoding the largest subunit of RNA polymerase II (RPB1), focusing on Lentinus subg. Lentinus sensu Pegler and the Neofavolus group, combined these data with sequences from GenBank (including RPB2 gene sequences) and performed phylogenetic analyses with maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods. We also evaluated the transition in hymenophore morphology between Lentinus, Neofavolus and related polypores with ancestral state reconstruction. Single-gene phylogenies and phylogenies combining ITS and 28S with RPB1 and RPB2 genes all support existence of a Lentinus/Polyporellus clade and a separate Neofavolus clade. Polyporellus (represented by P. arcularius, P. ciliatus, P. brumalis) forms a clade with species representing Lentinus subg. Lentinus sensu Pegler (1983), excluding L. suavissimus. Lentinus tigrinus appears as the sister group of Polyporellus in the four-gene phylogeny, but this placement was weakly supported. All three multigene analyses and the single-gene analysis using ITS strongly supported Polyporus tricholoma as the sister group of the Lentinus/Polyporellus clade; only the 28S rRNA phylogeny failed to support this placement. Under parsimony the ancestral hymenophoral configuration for the Lentinus/Polyporellus clade is estimated to be circular pores, with independent transitions to angular pores and lamellae. The ancestral state for the Neofavolus clade is estimated to be angular pores, with a single transition to lamellae in L. suavissimus. We propose that Lentinus suavissimus (section Pleuroti) should be reclassified as Neofavolus suavissimus comb. nov.
GIDB: a knowledge database for the automated curation and multidimensional analysis of molecular signatures in gastrointestinal cancer

Abstract Gastrointestinal (GI) cancer is common, characterized by high mortality, and includes oesophagus, gastric, liver, bile duct, pancreas, rectal and colon cancers. The insufficient specificity and sensitivity of biomarkers is still a key clinical hindrance for GI cancer diagnosis and successful treatment. The emergence of `precision medicine’, `basket trial’ and `field cancerization’ concepts calls for an urgent need and importance for the understanding of how organ system cancers occur at the molecular levels. Knowledge from both the literature and data available in public databases is informative in elucidating the molecular alterations underlying GI cancer. Currently, most available cancer databases have not offered a comprehensive discovery of gene-disease associations, molecular alterations and clinical information by integrated text mining and data mining in GI cancer. We develop GIDB, a panoptic knowledge database that attempts to automate the curation of molecular signatures using natural language processing approaches and multidimensional analyses. GIDB covers information on 8730 genes with both literature and data supporting evidence, 248 miRNAs, 58 lncRNAs, 320 copy number variations, 49 fusion genes and 2381 semantic networks. It presents a comprehensive database, not only in parallelizing supporting evidence and data integration for signatures associated with GI cancer but also in providing the timeline feature of major molecular discoveries. It highlights the most comprehensive overview, research hotspots and the development of historical knowledge of genes in GI cancer. Furthermore, GIDB characterizes genomic abnormalities in multilevel analysis, including simple somatic mutations, gene expression, DNA methylation and prognosis. GIDB offers a user-friendly interface and two customizable online tools (Heatmap and Network) for experimental researchers and clinicians to explore data and help them shorten the learning curve and broaden the scope of knowledge. More importantly, GIDB is an ongoing research project that will continue to be updated and improve the automated method for reducing manual work.
The Politics of Patronage in the United Kingdom: Shrinking Reach and Diluted Permeation

Delegation is a central concept in the study of governance and public policy. The modern state could not function without delegation because it provides a structural and esoteric capacity beyond the cognitive and physical limits of politicians. This article focuses on the role of ministers in making appointments to quasi-autonomous agencies, boards, and commissions in the United Kingdom. Research undertaken within the Cabinet Office reveals a pattern of shrinking reach and diluted permeation in relation to ministerial appointment powers. This finding is significant because the existing body of research in this field is generally associated with exposing clientelistic relationships between political parties and quangos, and patronage is frequently regarded as a resource through which political parties can “politicize” or “colonize” the state. This article therefore contributes a case study that exhibits countervailing tendencies and a quite different pattern of statecraft that raises broader questions about the evolution of state projects.
Optimal Financial Aid in Environmental Policy: A Real Options Approach ∗

In this paper, we analyze an environmental policy designed to reduce the emission of pollutants when there is uncertainty over the social costs of environmental damage. We first establish a model that incorporates financial aid in which there are two noncooperative agents: a developing country and a developed country. Then, we derive the closed-form solutions for the optimal levels of financial aid that the developed country gives to the developing country. Then, we compare the social welfare level implied by this model with those implied by two additional models; in one, two agents cooperate, and in the other, agents do not cooperate and there is no financial aid. Hence, we show that the means of providing financial aid plays an important role in reducing the fall in social welfare caused by external effects.
CAPITAL CONTROLS AND THE LENDING BEHAVIOUR OF SOUTH AFRICAN BANKS: PRELIMINARY FINDINGS ON THE EXPECTED IMPACT OF BASEL II

Banking regulation has developed rapidly over the past few years. There is a growing realization that the regulatory environment must keep pace with globalization and with advances in the financial sector. The 1988 Basel Capital Accord was an attempt to align regulatory capital with the actual underlying risks that banks face, thereby improving the soundness of the banking sector. The New Basel Capital Accord, due for implementation in South Africa in 2007, refines this principle and remedies some of the flaws of the 1988 Accord. This paper considers whether such implementation would have an effect on lending patterns and credit expansion in South Africa. It falls into five parts. Section 1 examines the "rationale" for the 1988 Basel Accord and outlines the relevant features of the New Accord. Section 2 reviews some of the criticisms directed towards the New Accord, concentrating on the speculation that its implementation will adversely affect bank credit expansion. Section 3 proposes a method of research for assessing the effect of the New Accord in South Africa. Section 4 analyses the trends in South African banking and considers how the New Accord may affect bank behaviour. Section 5 concludes. Copyright 2005 Economic Society of South Africa.
Consolidating the Evidence on Income Mobility in the Western States of Germany and the United States from 1984 to 2006

The cross‐national intragenerational literature has often analyzed income mobility within short time periods over which mobility might reasonably be thought of as invariant. Here, we argue that a great social transformation - German reunification - abruptly and permanently altered mobility. Using standard measures (with panel data for the western states of Germany and the United States) over the period 1984–2006, we find the conventional result that income mobility is greater in Germany. But when we cut the data into 5‐year windows, we find that income mobility declines significantly over the years immediately following reunification in Germany but not in the United States, using both measures.
Health status and wage differences: measuring productivity penalty and discrimination patterns

In this study by utilizing the 2008 Athens Area Study (AAS) data set, I examine to what extent inequalities in the Greek labour market between health-impaired and healthy employees may be attributed to differences in productivity and/or discrimination. A group of health-impaired male and female employees who self-reported that their productivity is not affected by their impairment is used to measure the effects of discrimination separately from the effects of poor health on wages. A penalty for heath-impaired employees having work limitations exists. Evidence of wage discrimination against health-impaired employees having no work limitations is also observed. Both findings are statistically significant. Currently, health-impaired people do not appear to face a level playing field in the Greek labour market.
Benchmarking RDF Stores for Smart City Services

Smart cities are providing advanced services gathering data from different sources. Cities collect static data like road graphs, service description as well as dynamic/real time data like weather forecast, traffic sensors, bus positions, events, emergency data, etc. RDF stores may be used to integrate all information coming from different sources and allow applications to use the data to provide new advanced services to the citizens and city administrators exploiting inferential capabilities. These city services are typically based on geographic positions and need to access quickly to the real time data (e.g., next time of bus arrival) as well as to the historical data to perform some data analysis to compute predictions. In this paper, the needs and constraints for RDF stores to be used for smart cities services and the currently available RDF stores are evaluated. The assessment model allows understanding if they are suitable as a basis for Smart City modeling and application. The benchmark proposed has been defined for generic smart city services to compare results that can be obtained using different RDF Stores. In the benchmark, particular emphasis is devoted to geo and full text searches that are partially considered in other well-known RDF store benchmarks as LUBM and BSBM. The paper reports the validation of the proposed Smart City RDF Benchmark (http://www.disit.org/smartcityrdfbenchmark) on the basis of Florence Smart City accessible as Km4City. The comparison addressed a number of well-known RDF stores as Virtuoso, GraphDB and many others.
DRILL: Micro Load Balancing for Low-latency Data Center Networks

The trend towards simple datacenter network fabric strips most network functionality, including load balancing, out of the network core and pushes it to the edge. This slows reaction to microbursts, the main culprit of packet loss in datacenters. We investigate the opposite direction: could slightly smarter fabric significantly improve load balancing? This paper presents DRILL, a datacenter fabric for Clos networks which performs micro load balancing to distribute load as evenly as possible on microsecond timescales. DRILL employs per-packet decisions at each switch based on local queue occupancies and randomized algorithms to distribute load. Our design addresses the resulting key challenges of packet reordering and topological asymmetry. In simulations with a detailed switch hardware model and realistic workloads, DRILL outperforms recent edge-based load balancers, particularly under heavy load. Under 80% load, for example, it achieves 1.3-1.4x lower mean flow completion time than recent proposals, primarily due to shorter upstream queues. To test hardware feasibility, we implement DRILL in Verilog and estimate its area overhead to be less than 1%. Finally, we analyze DRILL's stability and throughput-efficiency.
The Effects of Partially or Completely Substituted Dietary Zinc Sulfate by Lower Levels of Zinc Methionine on Growth Performance, Apparent Total Tract Digestibility, Immune Function, and Visceral Indices in Weaned Piglets

Simple Summary This study was conducted to assess the effects of five diets with different doses and sources of zinc (Zn) on the growth performance (average daily gain, average daily food intake and gain to feed ratio), apparent total tract digestibility of nutrients, serum metabolites and immune functions of weaned piglets. The control diet contained 100 mg/kg inorganic Zn from ZnSO4. The total dose of Zn in experimental diets was lower than that of the control diet, and the inorganic Zn from ZnSO4 was gradually replaced by organic Zn from ZnMet. Therefore, the experimental diets were a basal diet containing 75 + 12.5, 50 + 25, 25 + 37.5, and 0 + 50 mg/kg Zn from ZnSO4 and ZnMet, respectively. No differences were observed in growth performance, nutrient digestibility and serum metabolites. However, Zinc digestibility and parameters relating to body immune functions were improved when at least 50 mg of inorganic Zn was replaced by organic Zn. Thus supplementing 50 mg of inorganic Zn from ZnSO4 plus 25 mg of organic Zn from ZnMet to piglets would be the best strategy to benefit the immune system and maintain growth performance under the conditions of the current study. Abstract The study aimed to evaluate the effects of replacing zinc sulfate (ZnSO4) with a lower level of zinc methionine (ZnMet) on the growth performance, apparent total tract digestibility (ATTD) of nutrients, serum metabolites and immune functions of weaned piglets. Thirty-five weaned Duroc × Landrace × Large White male piglets (10.69 ± 0.26 kg) were randomly allotted to five diets. The control diet was supplemented with 100 mg/kg of Zn from ZnSO4, and experimental diets included 75 + 12.5, 50 + 25, 25 + 37.5, and 0 + 50 mg/kg of Zn from ZnSO4 and ZnMet, respectively. The results showed that no differences were observed in growth performance, ATTD of nutrients and serum metabolites among treatments, while serum white blood cell count, lymphocyte count, IgM contents and spleen index were higher (p < 0.01) in piglets fed with 50 + 25 mg/kg of Zn. Zinc digestibility (p < 0.05), IgA content (p < 0.001) and thymus index (p < 0.05) were increased when at least 50% of ZnSO4 was replaced by ZnMet. All the results indicated that using a lower level of ZnMet in weaned piglet’s diet instead of ZnSO4 had no adverse impacts on ATTD of nutrients and serum metabolites; and a 50 + 25 mg/kg of Zn (from ZnSO4 and ZnMet, respectively) diet showed the best advantages for parameters relating to immune functions.
Low-Frequency Stimulation Depresses the Primate Anterior-Cingulate-Cortex and Prevents Spontaneous Recovery of Aversive Memories

Functional abnormalities in the dorsal-anterior-cingulate-cortex (dACC) underlie anxiety disorders and specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Promising and common behavioral approaches have limited effectiveness and many subjects exhibit spontaneous recovery of fear, as also evident in animal models following extinction training. Here, we use low-frequency stimulation (LFS), a protocol shown to induce long-term depression, with the aim of affecting synaptic plasticity induced by fear acquisition and extinction. We use aversive conditioning of either tone or visual stimuli paired with an aversive air-puff to the eye in a trace-conditioning paradigm. We find that LFS in the nonhuman primate (Macaca fascicularis) dACC, when combined with extinction training, was successful in preventing spontaneous recovery of the memory 24–72 h following extinction. We simultaneously record single-units and local-field-potentials across the dACC, and show that LFS gradually depressed evoked responses. Moreover, this decrease in neural excitability predicted the successful reduction of overnight spontaneous recovery on a day-by-day basis. Finally, we show that this effect occurs when using either visual or auditory modality as the conditioned stimulus, and that the reduction was specific to the conditioned modality. Our results suggest that the primate dACC is actively involved in maintaining the original aversive memory, and propose that a combination of LFS with behavioral therapy might significantly improve treatment in severe cases.
Defense economics: Achievements and challenges

Defense economics is now an established part of economics. This article reviews its achievements as represented by papers published in the research journal Defense and Peace Economics. The range of topics in the journal is reviewed, especially since 2000, and major gaps in coverage are identified. A changing research agenda reflects new developments such as terrorism and international peacekeeping. Gaps remain such as the need for good quality case studies of conflict (e.g., Iraq) and of major weapons projects (e.g., F-22 Raptor). Some challenges are outlined, namely, the choices resulting from the defense economics problem, the U.K.'s nuclear weapons policy, project case studies (e.g., Eurofighter Typhoon), military outsourcing, and data problems.