Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Macromodeling of the Memristor in SPICE

In this paper, we present a new simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis macromodel of the recently physically implemented memristor. This macromodel could be a powerful tool for electrical engineers to design and experiment new circuits with memristors. Our simulation results show similar behavior to the already published measurements of the physical implementation. Our approach provides a solution for the modeling of boundary conditions following exactly the published mathematical model of HP Labs. The functionality of our macromodel is demonstrated with computer simulations. The source code of our macromodel is provided.
A tutorial on Reed–Solomon coding for fault‐tolerance in RAID‐like systems

It is well‐known that Reed‐Solomon codes may be used to provide error correction for multiple failures in RAID‐like systems. The coding technique itself, however, is not as well‐known. To the coding theorist, this technique is a straightforward extension to a basic coding paradigm and needs no special mention. However, to the systems programmer with no training in coding theory, the technique may be a mystery. Currently, there are no references that describe how to perform this coding that do not assume that the reader is already well‐versed in algebra and coding theory. This paper is intended for the systems programmer. It presents a complete specification of the coding algorithm plus details on how it may be implemented. This specification assumes no prior knowledge of algebra or coding theory. The goal of this paper is for a systems programmer to be able to implement Reed‐Solomon coding for reliability in RAID‐like systems without needing to consult any external references. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Structuring Protocol Implementations to Protect Sensitive Data

In a bid to limit the harm caused by ubiquitous remotely exploitable software vulnerabilities, the computer systems security community has proposed primitives to allow execution of application code with reduced privilege. In this paper, we identify and address the vital and largely unexamined problem of how to structure implementations of cryptographic protocols to protect sensitive data despite exploits. As evidence that this problem is poorly understood, we first identify two attacks that lead to disclosure of sensitive data in two published state-of-the-art designs for exploit-resistant cryptographic protocol implementations: privilege-separated OpenSSH, and the HiStar/DStar DIFC-based SSL web server. We then describe how to structure protocol implementations on UNIX- and DIFC-based systems to defend against these two attacks and protect sensitive information from disclosure. We demonstrate the practicality and generality of this approach by applying it to protect sensitive data in the implementations of both the server and client sides of OpenSSH and of the OpenSSL library.
Iterative Joint Integrated Probabilistic Data Association

In situations with a significant number of targets in mutual proximity (close to each other), optimal multi target data association approach suffers from the numerical explosion. This severely limits the applicability; i.e. the number of close targets that may be reliably tracked. We propose an iterative implementation of Joint Integrated Probabilistic Data Association (JIPDA). Starting level is Integrated Probabilistic Data Association (IPDA) for single target tracking, and each subsequent level improves the approximation towards JIPDA. The required number of iterations to achieve the performance of JIPDA is finite for tracking finite number of targets. Increasing the number of iterations also increases computational expenses. Thus we provide the possibility of trade off between the performance and the computational resources by adjusting the number of iterations.
Supporters in Deed - Studying Online Support Provision from the Perspective of Social Capital

The phenomenon of social support – aid and assistance exchanged through social relationships and interpersonal transactions – has been studied for decades with a focus on discovering the mechanism that lies between support exchange and personal wellbeing. In the age of the Internet, researchers also have shifted their focus to online support exchange. However, little attention has been paid to conceptualizing the determinants of support provision in virtual support communities. Drawing from social capital theory, this study attempts to bridge this gap by presenting a model that applies the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital to theorize the determinants of the provision of informational and emotional support in virtual support communities. Through the use of social network analysis and machine learning techniques, messages from a virtual support community for women with breast cancer are analyzed. The analysis results are used for empirically testing the framework modeling support provision.
An Efficient System for Cancer Detection using Digital Mammograms

Breast cancer can be considered one of the most dangerous types of cancer among women. Early detection of breast cancer leads to significant improvements in treatment. Digital mammograms are one of the most effective means for detecting breast cancer in early stages. In this paper, an efficient system based on performing professional pre-processing phase and on applying Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for features extraction, and support vector machine has been used for classification into benign and malignant. We have used Mias data set for experimentation purpose. We tune the coefficients of DCT to get the best sensitivity, specificity, positive predicitivity, and accuracy results. We reach 100% performance rate in some cases.
Decoupling spectral overlap of intermediate band solar cells using low-high state filling

The high efficiency predicted for solar cells based on multi-photon processes relies on the assumption of optical transitions with non-overlapping spectral bands. Spectral overlap reduces the conversion efficiency due to energy loss associated with improper usage of higher energy photons for lower energy optical transitions. In this study, device structures with non-uniform occupation of intermediate electronic states are proposed to reduce the dependence of conversion efficiency on spectral overlap. Solar cell conversion efficiencies are calculated for structures where absorption bands are spatially decoupled due to defined occupation of intermediate states. Conversion efficiencies for a two section and three section device with spectral overlap of 4 eV are determined to be 52.8 % and 61.5 %, respectively, and are significantly larger than the calculated efficiency of 35.1% for the case of a standard multi-photon cell with uniform half-filled intermediate states The spectrally-decoupled device provides a means to achieve high theoretical efficiency independent of spectral overlap that approaches the detailed balance efficiency limit of 63.2 % for intermediate state devices without spectral overlap and 63.8 % for unconstrained triple-junction tandem cells.
Operative Management of Haglund's Deformity in the Nonathlete: A Retrospective Study

Haglund's deformity, or “pump bump,” is a common cause of posterior heel pain. Management of the condition usually consists of nonoperative therapy. This study presents a retrospective study of 65 cases (53 patients), with symptomatic Haglund's deformity in nonathletes (13 male and 40 female), who presented during a 4-year period (1989–1994). Sixty-five percent (39 heels) of these patients failed to respond to nonoperative therapy for an average of 62 weeks, (range, 4–260 weeks). This group of patients went on to operative treatment. Surgical management consisted of excision of the posterior calcaneal tuberosity through a medial longitudinal incision with debridement, r'eattachment of the Achilles tendon using bone anchors, and 4 weeks of postoperative immobilization. Thirty-nine patients (74%) were contacted for follow-up. The average follow-up period for these patients was 155 weeks, (range, 92–335 weeks). There were 50% excellent results, 47% good results, 3% fair results (1 patient), and no poor results. The Maryland Foot Score for operated heels was an average of 67/100 preoperative and an average of 92/100 postoperative. On unoperated heels the score was an average of 81/100 at first evaluation and an average of 86/100 at final evaluation. Complications included one recurrence of painful prominence, one wound infection, and one incisional neuroma. The outcome of these cases demonstrated that in those patients who fail nonoperative treatment, surgical treatment of Haglund's deformity produces a predictably good surgical result when performed using the technique described.
Mouse Cofactor of BRCA1 (Cobra1) Is Required for Early Embryogenesis

Background Negative elongation factor (NELF) is a four-subunit protein complex conserved from Drosophila to humans. In vitro biochemical and tissue culture-based studies have demonstrated an important role of NELF in controlling RNA polymerase II (Pol II) pausing in transcription. However, the physiological significance of NELF function is not clear due to the lack of any genetic systems for studying NELF. Principal Findings Here we show that disruption of the mouse B subunit of NELF (NELF-B), also known as cofactor of BRCA1 (Cobra1), causes inner cell mass (ICM) deficiency and embryonic lethality at the time of implantation. Consistent with the phenotype of the Cobra1 knockout (KO) embryos, knockdown of Cobra1 in mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) reduces the efficiency of colony formation and increases spontaneous differentiation. Cobra1-depleted ESCs maintain normal levels of Oct4, Nanog, and Sox2, master regulators of pluripotency in ESCs. However, knockdown of Cobra1 leads to precocious expression of developmental regulators including lymphoid enhancer-binding factor 1 (Lef1). Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) indicates that Cobra1 binds to the Lef1 promoter and modulates the abundance of promoter-bound RNA polymerase. Conclusions Cobra1 is essential for early embryogenesis. Our findings also indicate that Cobra1 helps maintain the undifferentiated state of mESCs by preventing unscheduled expression of developmental genes.
Analyzing the Overhead of Self-Optimization through Task Migration within a Decentralized Task Control Mechanism for Dependable System-on-Chip Architectures

This article presents our concept of an artificial hormone system for realizing a completely decentralized self-organizing and real-time capable task control mechanism using self-X properties. Besides the fundamentals of the prior hormone concept and the implementation model, we present latest results of our research: specification and analysis of an accurate timing model according the self-optimization procedure, using global task migration across a redundant multi-core SoC architecture. Furthermore we validate and compare the overhead in task migration towards the performance gain in execution, leading to first assessment in efficiency and profitability of the migration based optimization schemes.
TCNet: cross-node virtual machine communication acceleration

Driven by rapid development of cloud computing, virtualized environments are becoming popular in data center. Frequent communication among multiple virtual machines is required by a large amount of applications. Although many virtualization acceleration techniques have been proposed, the network performance is still a hot research topic due to the complicated and costly implementations of I/O virtualization mechanism. Some previous research focuses on improving the efficiency of communication among virtual machines in the same host. But studying how to accelerate cross-node virtual machine communication is also necessary. On the other hand, many high efficient, tight-coupling interconnects have been proposed as data center interconnects. They have advantages in performance and efficiency, while traditional Ethernet and InfiniBand have good scalability. However, these two kinds of interconnects can coexist very well. Tight-coupling protocol is suitable for connecting small-scale data center nodes, which we call super-node, while super-node is connected by traditional interconnect. In our opinion, data center with such hybrid interconnect architecture is one of important trends. Targeting the hybrid interconnect architecture, this paper proposes an efficient mechanism, named as TCNet (abbreviation for tight-coupling network), to accelerate cross-node virtual machine communication. To verify the acceleration mechanism, we build a prototype system which chooses PCIe (for inner-super-node interconnect) and Ethernet (for inter-super-node interconnect) as the hybrid interconnect and use KVM as software environments. We use several benchmarks to evaluate the mechanism. The latency of TCNet is 23% shorter than that of Gigabit Ethernet on average and the bandwidth is 1.14 times as large as that of Gigabit Ethernet on average. Besides, we use Specweb2006 to evaluate its web service ability. TCNet can support 20% more clients simultaneously than that of Ethernet and response requests 19% faster. The results demonstrate that TCNet has great potential to accelerate cross-node virtual machine communication for data center with hybrid interconnect.
Means and ENDS – e-cigarettes, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and global health diplomacy in action

ABSTRACT E-cigarettes are a new and disruptive element in global health diplomacy (GHD) and policy-making. This is an ethnographic account of how e-cigarettes and other Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) were tackled at the 6th Conference of the Parties to the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. It demonstrates how uncertainty about ENDS and differences of opinion are currently so great that ‘agreeing to disagree’ as a consensus position and ‘strategic use of time’ were the principles that ensured effective GHD in this case. Observers representing accredited non-governmental organisations were active in briefing and lobbying country delegates not to spend too much time debating an issue for which insufficient evidence exists, and for which countries were unlikely to reach a consensus on a specific regulatory approach or universally applicable regulatory measures. Equally, the work of Costa Rica in preparing and re-negotiating the draft decision, and the work of the relevant Committee Chair in managing the discussion, contributed to effectively reining in lengthy statements from Parties and focusing on points of consensus. As well as summarising the debate itself and analysing the issues surrounding it, this account offers an example of GHD working effectively in a situation of epistemic uncertainty.
Automatic performance tuning of sparse matrix kernels

This dissertation presents an automated system to generate highly efficient, platform-adapted implementations of sparse matrix kernels. We show that conventional implementations of important sparse kernels like sparse matrix-vector multiply (SpMV) have historically run at 10% or less of peak machine speed on cache-based superscalar architectures. Our implementations of SpMV, automatically tuned using a methodology based on empirical-search, can by contrast achieve up to 31% of peak machine speed, and can be up to 4× faster. Given a matrix, kernel, and machine; our approach to selecting a fast implementation consists of two steps: (1) we identify and generate a space of reasonable implementations, and then (2) search this space for the fastest one using a combination of heuristic models and actual experiments (i.e., running and timing the code). We build on the SPARSITY system for generating highly-tuned implementations of the SpMV kernel y ← y + Ax, where A is a sparse matrix and x, y are dense vectors. We extend SPARSITY to support tuning for a variety of common non-zero patterns arising in practice, and for additional kernels like sparse triangular solve (SpTS) and computation of ATA·x (or AAT·x) and A ρ·x. We develop new models to compute, for particular data structures and kernels, the best absolute performance (e.g., Mflop/s) we might expect on a given matrix and machine. These performance upper bounds account for the cost of memory operations at all levels of the memory hierarchy, but assume ideal instruction scheduling and low-level tuning. We evaluate our performance with respect to such bounds, finding that the generated and tuned implementations of SpMV and SpTS achieve up to 75% of the performance bound. This finding places limits on the effectiveness of additional low-level tuning (e.g., better instruction selection and scheduling). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
A Mesoscopic Hysteresis Model Based on the Unconstrained Minimization of the Gibbs Free Energy

Mesoscopic hysteresis models are based on a simplified description of the micromagnetic theory in order to simulate magnetization processes on the magnetic domain space scale. Hence, these models are situated between the micromagnetic and macroscopic models. In the presented mesoscopic description, the local magnetization is assumed to be aligned with either the cubic anisotropy axes or with the applied field. In this framework, the magnetization dynamics result from a constrained minimization of the Gibbs free energy. The numerical solution of this constrained minimization problem is highly time consuming. This paper presents a remapping of the model variables, which transforms the constrained minimization problem to an unconstrained problem and consequently results in a speed up and stabilization of the numerical scheme. Moreover, a model parameter analysis is carried out to further optimize the computational burden of the presented unconstrained procedure.
Polymerization of Microtubule-associated Protein Tau under Near-physiological Conditions (*)

Neurofibrillary tangles, which form in certain degenerating neurons in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease, are amassed from filaments having a straight or paired helical morphology. Solubilization of these filaments reveals that they are composed of the microtubule-associated protein tau. It has not previously been shown, however, that tau will assemble to form filaments of similar morphology under conditions representative of the intracellular environment. We have succeeded in forming such filaments using tau purified from porcine or rat microtubules. The filaments are relatively straight with narrowing at irregular intervals, and are about 10 nm wide, a morphology similar to that of straight filaments seen in Alzheimer's disease neurofibrillary tangles. At tau concentrations of 1-10 μM, in vitro assembly occurs at physiological pH, ionic strength, temperature, and reducing potential, and each one of these factors modulates the reaction. Assembly is judged to be only slowly reversible by the exponential rather than normal distribution of filament lengths, and by the limited disassembly observed under conditions which inhibit polymerization. Tau purified directly from whole brain tissue rather than from microtubules does not polymerize under conditions described in this report.
The Soil and Water Assessment Tool: Historical Development, Applications, and Future Research Directions

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is a continuation of nearly 30 years of modeling efforts conducted by the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS). SWAT has gained international acceptance as a robust interdisciplinary watershed modeling tool as evidenced by international SWAT conferences, hundreds of SWAT-related papers presented at numerous other scientific meetings, and dozens of articles published in peer-reviewed journals. The model has also been adopted as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Better Assessment Science Integrating Point and Nonpoint Sources (BASINS) software package and is being used by many U.S. federal and state agencies, including the USDA within the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP). At present, over 250 peer-reviewed published articles have been identified that report SWAT applications, reviews of SWAT components, or other research that includes SWAT. Many of these peer-reviewed articles are summarized here according to relevant application categories such as streamflow calibration and related hydrologic analyses, climate change impacts on hydrology, pollutant load assessments, comparisons with other models, and sensitivity analyses and calibration techniques. Strengths and weaknesses of the model are presented, and recommended research needs for SWAT are also provided.
The Behavior of Zibun Revisited and the Theory of Grammar

In the theoretical analysis of reflexivization in Sohng (2004a), it is predicted that Japanese zibun, which is used for all persons, lacks inherent Φ-features in the Lexicon and gets its Φ-features at LF, like Chinese ziji. Zibun, like ziji, shows strong subject orientation, but does not manifest the blocking effect, unlike ziji. This paper shows that strong subject orientation for zibun and ziji follows from the modified Minimalist Conditions on Subject Orientation and LF Spec-head agreement under the [Ref] feature checking analysis in the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995). This paper goes on to show that the lack of the blocking effect of zibun follows from Conditions on Subject Orientation and Spec-head agreement, under the theoretical perspective that Agreement (Φ-features), EPP, and the Case features are optional in Japanese.
Disrupted Intrinsic Local Synchronization in Poststroke Aphasia

AbstractEvidence has accumulated from the task-related and task-free (i.e., resting state) studies that alternations of intrinsic neural networks exist in poststroke aphasia (PSA) patients. However, information is lacking on the changes in the local synchronization of spontaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging blood–oxygen level-dependent fluctuations in PSA at rest.We investigated the altered intrinsic local synchronization using regional homogeneity (ReHo) on PSA (n = 17) and age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs) (n = 20). We examined the correlations between the abnormal ReHo values and the aphasia severity and language performance in PSA.Compared with HCs, the PSA patients exhibited decreased intrinsic local synchronization in the right lingual gyrus, the left calcarine, the left cuneus, the left superior frontal gyrus (SFG), and the left medial of SFG. The local synchronization (ReHo value) in the left medial of SFG was positively correlated with aphasia severity (r = 0.55, P = 0.027) and the naming scores of Aphasia Battery of Chinese (r = 0.66, P = 0.005). This result is consistent with the important role of this value in language processing even in the resting state.The pathogenesis of PSA may be attributed to abnormal intrinsic local synchronous in multiple brain regions.