Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The new architecture of Chinese abacus multiplier

This study demonstrated a 4×4 bits multiplier that was based on the Chinese abacus. Comparing the simulation results of this work with the speed and power consumption of the 4×4 bits Braun array multiplier, this 4×4 bits abacus multiplier showed a 19.7% and 10.6% delay improvement in 0. 35µm and 0. 18µm technology respectively than that of the 4×4 bits Braun array multiplier, while power consumption of the 4×4 bits abacus multiplier was 8.7% and 18% lower respectively.The performance: power-consumption*delay of the abacus multiplier is respectively, less about 23.2% and 23.5% also.
Geldanamycin Derivative Ameliorates High Fat Diet-Induced Renal Failure in Diabetes

Diabetic nephropathy is a serious complication of longstanding diabetes and its pathogenesis remains unclear. Oxidative stress may play a critical role in the pathogenesis and progression of diabetic nephropathy. Our previous studies have demonstrated that polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) induce peroxynitrite generation in primary human kidney mesangial cells and heat shock protein 90β1 (hsp90β1) is indispensable for the PUFA action. Here we investigated the effects of high fat diet (HFD) on kidney function and structure of db/db mice, a widely used rodent model of type 2 diabetes. Our results indicated that HFD dramatically increased the 24 h-urine output and worsened albuminuria in db/db mice. Discontinuation of HFD reversed the exacerbated albuminuria but not the increased urine output. Prolonged HFD feeding resulted in early death of db/db mice, which was associated with oliguria and anuria. Treatment with the geldanamycin derivative, 17-(dimethylaminoehtylamino)-17-demethoxygeldanamycin (17-DMAG), an hsp90 inhibitor, preserved kidney function, and ameliorated glomerular and tubular damage by HFD. 17-DMAG also significantly extended survival of the animals and protected them from the high mortality associated with renal failure. The benefit effect of 17-DMAG on renal function and structure was associated with a decreased level of kidney nitrotyrosine and a diminished kidney mitochondrial Ca2+ efflux in HFD-fed db/db mice. These results suggest that hsp90β1 is a potential target for the treatment of nephropathy and renal failure in diabetes.
Decoupling Control of a Variable-Air-Volume Air-Conditioning System Based on State Feedback

Variable-air-volume (VAV) air-conditioning systems have the features of multi-variable, strong coupling and non-linearity. Conventionally, there are three control loops to regulate the process variables. However, When the control loops function simultaneously, intense coupling or interaction among them occurs, which directly affects the performance and the stability of the VAV system. In this study, we aimed to eliminate the coupling by using state feedback decoupling method. First, we obtained a minimum realization of state space model from the transfer function matrix model of the VAV system in a laboratory; Then, an state feedback decoupling control system was designed based on multiply variable system control theory; Finally, on-site test in a laboratory was carried out to compare the effects of decoupling control with that of conventional control. Test results show that the proposed decoupling techniques improve the stability of the system significantly, thus validating the feasibility of state-feedback decoupling application to VAV systems.
High-Dimensional Access Methods for Eﬃcient Similarity Queries

Retrieving similar complex documents such as images, sounds, DNA sequences, from within a large collection is an issues of main importance. While content modeling and retrieval algorithms tends to perform more and more eﬃciently, the methods to access the documents through their abstraction in form of high-dimensional feature vectors perform still poorly. In this report we detail the diﬀerent access methods that have been proposed to perform similarity queries on multi-dimensional feature space, we present the reason of their ineﬃciency in high-dimensional feature space and ﬁnally we review the attempts to solve these issues.
The microRNA-124-iGluR2/3 pathway regulates glucagon release from alpha cells

Glucagon, secreted from islet alpha cells, plays an important role in regulating glucose homeostasis; however, the molecular mechanism underlying this process is not fully understood. Previous studies have demonstrated that miRNAs are involved in the function of alpha cells. Glutamate promotes glucagon secretion by mediating the opening of Ca2+ channels. In this present, iGluR2 and iGluR3 levels were significantly increased in fasting-treated mouse islets. Additional studies showed that miR-124-3p simultaneously regulates the expression of iGluR2 and iGluR3 through the direct targeting of mRNA 3'UTR of these two genes. The miR-124-iGluRs pathway also contributed to the high level of glucagon secretion through long-term high glucose levels. Thus, a novel pathway comprising miRNA, glutamate and iGluRs has been demonstrated to regulate the biological process of glucagon release.
Do males offset the cost of female aggression? An experimental test in a biparental songbird

Aggressive behavior in females is thought to be costly due to a trade-off between aggression and parental care. In biparental systems, resolution of this trade-off may depend on the extent to which males mitigate the cost of female aggression. Using a population of tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) in which intrasexual aggression has been shown to be beneficial to females in acquiring a nesting cavity, but costly in terms of offspring quality, I asked if the cost of female aggression is offset by her partner. First, I determined if pairs mate disassortatively by aggressiveness and whether the degree of dissimilarity of aggressiveness correlates with parameters of reproductive success. I then experimentally handicapped males to test whether female aggressiveness becomes more costly when males provision young less. I found no evidence of disassortative mating, although pairs differing more in aggressiveness laid more and larger eggs. When male provisioning was reduced, offspring were no worse in quality, but nestling mortality increased. Aggressive behavior was only associated with a fitness cost in control nests. Therefore, males may mitigate the cost of aggression for their female partners indirectly, not by compensating for poor parenting by aggressive females, but instead by females investing more heavily in reproduction when mated to a male that is more different from her own phenotype. To the extent this differential allocation outweighs the cost of aggressiveness, male phenotype may play a key role in understanding the selective pressures shaping the evolution of aggressive behavior in females. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.
Evaluation of Parallel Authentic Research-Based Courses in Human Biology on Student Experiences at Stanford University and the University of Gothenburg

Abstract: Under a previous grant (2005-08), researchers and teachers at Stanford University (SU) and the University of Gothenburg (GU) co-designed a ten-week interdisciplinary, research-based laboratory course in human biology to be taught online to undergraduate students. Essentials in the subject were taught during the first four weeks of this course. Subsequently, student groups at SU and GU developed their own research questions, conducted live-streamed experiments remotely, processed their unique data with support from multiple interactive resources, cross-cultural collaboration and an interdisciplinary network of expert consultants, and presented original scientific results remotely. Student course-perceptions were evaluated using online questionnaires, scientific logbooks, and observations. In student teams from both universities, the course concept clearly improved student abilities to conduct research using laboratory experiments while learning theoretical basics. A comparison of pre and post course scores from student surveys showed that post course student comfort levels with several research-related tasks increased radically at both universities. All participating staff generally agreed that the methods and tools were valuable in this type of course and should be evaluated at other levels and areas of higher education, and shared in an expanded network of universities.
Four Integration Patterns: IS Development as Stepwise Adaptation of Technology and Organisation

Integration and adaptation between an information system and the related business organisation is an important challenge for IS development project managers. Both IS research and software engineering research have contributed important lessons on integration, but at the practical level of IS development projects the processes of integration and mutual adaptation is less well understood. In this paper we apply a socio-technical perspective to analyze the integration of stakeholders and technical components, and we identify four generic integration patterns; Big Bang, Stakeholder Integration, Technical Integration and Socio-Technical Integration. Three case studies of iterative software development projects are used to illustrate the patterns. These illustrations highlight the management challenges of iterative integration. While early integration increases the likelihood of implementation success, it also increases the complexity of the projects. For practitioners the four integration patterns represent an analytical tool for planning iterative systems development projects. For IS research the four integration patterns are a contribution to a vocabulary for describing socio-technical integration.
On-Demand Medium Access in Multihop Wireless Networks with Multiple Beam Smart Antennas

The paper presents a detailed discussion of various issues involved in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol for multihop wireless networks with nodes employing multiple beam smart antennas. Multiple beam smart antennas can form several beams simultaneously and can initiate concurrent transmissions or receptions . in them, thereby increasing the throughput of the bottleneck nodes. Traditional on-demand MAC protocols for omnidirectional and single beam directional antennas based on the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism cannot take advantage of this unique capability of multiple beam antennas as they do not facilitate concurrent transmissions or receptions by a node. This paper introduces a novel protocol, hybrid MAC (HMAC), which enables concurrent packet reception (CPR) and concurrent packet transmission (CPT) at a node equipped with multiple beam antennas and is backward compatible with IEEE 802.11 DCF. Simulation results show the superior performance of HMAC in most ad hoc scenarios. Moreover, in some sample topologies, the throughput of HMAC is close to the theoretical maximum. The paper also presents a wireless mesh network architecture with heterogeneous antenna technologies and illustrates the advantages of employing multiple beam smart antennas and HMAC in such networks.
Vector Field Path Following for Miniature Air Vehicles

In this paper, a method for accurate path following for miniature air vehicles is developed. The method is based on the notion of vector fields, which are used to generate desired course inputs to inner-loop attitude control laws. Vector-field path-following control laws are developed for straight-line paths and circular arcs and orbits. Lyapunov stability arguments are used to demonstrate asymptotic decay of path-following errors in the presence of constant wind disturbances. Experimental flight tests have demonstrated mean path-following errors on less than one wingspan for straight-line and orbit paths and less than three wingspans for paths with frequent changes in direction.
Y chromosome microdeletions: implications for assisted conception

The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 16 October 2006 185 8 433-434 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2006 www.mja. com.au Chromosomes and hormones — Editorial the testis. An association between Y chromosomal deletions and first reported in 1976 by Tiepolo and Zuffardi, who de deletions in six azoospermic men by routine karyoty chromosomal banding. They proposed that an azoo (AZF) region was associated with spermatogenesis. Ex cal, functional and genetic analyses of the Y chromosom Some boys conceived through artificial techniques may inherit their fathers’ subfertility
On the Sublinear Processor Gap for Multi-Core Architectures University of Waterloo Technical Report CS-2012-20

In the past, parallel algorithms were developed, for the most part, under the assumption that the number of processors is Θ(n) and that if in practice the actual number was smaller, this could be resolved using Brent’s Lemma to simulate the highly parallel solution on a lower-degree parallel architecture. In this paper, however, we argue that design and implementation issues of algorithms and architectures are significantly different—both in theory and in practice—between computational models with high and low degrees of parallelism. We report an observed gap in the behavior of a CMP/parallel architecture depending on the number of processors. This gap appears repeatedly in both empirical cases, when studying practical aspects of architecture design and program implementation as well as in theoretical instances when studying the behaviour of various parallel algorithms. It separates the performance, design and analysis of systems with a sublinear number of processors and systems with linearly many processors. More specifically we observe that systems with either logarithmically many cores or with O(n) cores (with α < 1) exhibit a qualitatively different behavior than a system with a linear number of cores on the size of the input, i.e. Θ(n). The evidence we present suggests the existence of a sharp theoretical gap between the classes of problems that can be efficiently parallelized with o(n) processors and with Θ(n) processors unless NC = P .
The Role of Prior Experience in User's Engagement with a New Recommender System

In this article we performed an online experiment to test the role of the user’s prior experience with recommender systems in his/her engagement with a new recommendation technology. Our research model is based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) with two new constructs corresponding to the simplicity of the graphical user interface and the skills the user believe he/she has to use recommender systems. Our experiments confirmed the hypothesis that prior user experience plays an important role in which factors affect the user engagement with a new system.
Visual Scale Factor for Speed Perception

Speed perception is an important task depending mainly on optic flow that the driver must perform continuously to control his/her vehicle. Unfortunately it appears that in some driving simulators speed perception is under estimated, leading into speed production higher than in real conditions. Perceptual validity is then not good enough to study driver’s behavior. To solve this problem, a technique has recently seen the light, which consists of modifying the geometric field of view (GFOV) while keeping the real field of view (FOV) constant. We define our visual scale factor as the ratio between the GFOV and the FOV. The present study has been carried out on the SAAM dynamic driving simulator and aims at determining the precise effect of this visual scale factor on the speed perception. 20 subjects have reproduced 2 speeds (50 km/h and 90 km/h) without knowing the numerical values of these consigns, with 5 different visual scale factors: 0.70, 0.85, 1.00, 1.15 and 1.30. We show that speed perception significantly increases when the visual factor increases. A 0.15 modification of this factor is enough to obtain a significant effect. Furthermore, the relative variation of the speed perception is proportional to the visual scale factor. Besides, the modification of the geometric field of view remained unnoticed by all the subjects, which implies that this technique can be easily used to make drivers reduce their speed in driving simulation conditions. However, this technique may also modify perception of distances.
Action monitoring in cognitive robots

Cognitive robots need to detect execution failures in runtime to prevent potential damages to their environments or objects in their interest. For this reason, robots monitor the execution to detect any inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a hybrid monitoring system that processes different sensory data from different sources by using both model-based and model-free methods. Our proposed system continually monitors formulas, represented in Metric Temporal Logic (MTL), related to each action in order to detect failures. These formulas are analysed temporally according to the sensory data gathered during the execution to decide on a failure.
DRUM DETECTION FROM POLYPHONIC AUDIO VIA DETAILED ANALYSIS OF THE TIME FREQUENCY DOMAIN

This publication presents a method for the automatic detection and classification of three distinct drum instruments in real world musical signals. The regarded instruments are kick, snare and hi-hat as agreed by the participants of the contest category Audio Drum Detection within the 2nd Annual Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX 2005). There are two challenging issues inherent to drum sound recognition in polyphonic music. The first problem is that the drum sound itself can vary greatly within the same instrument class, due to playing techniques, recording situation and electronic effects. The second apparent problem is the interference and masking with all other instruments sounding simultaneously with the drum in a musical signal, making it difficult to reliably detect occurrences of a certain drum type. The method outlined here achieves a solution to these problems by extending a source separation approach described in earlier publications with spectrogram templates and a more elaborate classification approach. Performance results of the system are given by the outcomes of the Audio Drum Detection contest within the MIREX 2005.
Mitigating Routing Attacks with Local Trust in DHTs

Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) have been used as a common building block in many distributed applications, including Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Cloud and Grid Computing. However, there are still important security vulnerabilities that hinder their adoption in today’s large-scale computing platforms. For instance, routing vulnerabilities have been a subject of intensive research but existing solutions are mainly based on redundancy. Regarding redundancy, there exist well-studied techniques that strengthen DHTs against routing attacks. The trouble is that the introduction of redundancy increases communication costs and might significantly reduce scalability. Therefore, it seems reasonable to focus on improving the quality of routing paths in terms of forwarder reliability. In this thesis, we present Sophia, a novel and generic security technique which combines iterative routing with local trust to fortify routing in DHTs. Sophia strictly benefits from first-hand observations about the success/failure of a node’s own lookups to improve forwarding paths. Moreover, unlike redundant routing, Sophia dynamically protects routing without introducing additional network overhead. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which exploits a local trust system to fortify routing in DHTs. We compared the performance of Sophia with redundant routing techniques in the Kademlia DHT. Our simulation framework considers both stable and dynamic scenarios as well as several threat models. In our simulations, Sophia obtained significant improvements regarding routing resilience, self-adjustment and network traffic reduction compared with traditional routing redundancy techniques.
Power Loss Analysis of a TET System for High Power Implantable Devices

Efficiency of a transcutaneous energy transfer (TET) system is very important when delivering a substantial amount of power both in terms of heat generation and battery capacity for portable operation. Accurate analysis of the efficiency of different sub-systems within a TET system is important to identify the areas where significant improvements are most likely. A general approach to characterizing and quantifying power losses is presented. The methods are used to identify power loss components in a TET system capable of providing 10 W of power under loose coupling conditions. It has been found the greatest potential for efficiency improvements for this system is associated with power conditioning stage, primary resonant inductor and base/gate drive circuits.
Hierarchically animated transitions in visualizations of tree structures

We present an experimental comparison of 4 techniques for smoothly animating changes in a radial tree visualization. Two traditional techniques, linear and staged animation, are compared with two novel techniques a hierarchical animation that proceeds level-by-level through the tree, and a hybrid animation technique that mixes the staged and hierarchical approaches. Users were asked to track changes in nodes of the tree during animated transitions. Results show a significant advantage for the hierarchical and hybrid animation techniques for tracking certain kinds of changes. We then propose guidelines for designing animated transitions. Finally, we present a new popup widget for interactively controlling the progression of an animation that combines advantages of previous widgets.
Tocotrienol Modulates the Expression of Proteins in Oxidative Stress-Induced Caenorhabditis Elegans

Objective: Oxidative stress that damages proteins result in aging and age related diseases. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of tocotrienol rich fraction (TRF) on the expression of proteins in oxidative stress-induced caenohabditis elegans (C.elegans) which has homologous genes to humans. Methods: The worms were treated with TRF prior to, after and continuously in separate groups upon induction of oxidative stress with hydrogen peroxide. The expression of proteins were analyzed with 2D-gel electrophoresis and identified with mass spectrophotometry. Results showed that induction of oxidative stress and TRF treatment separately modulated the expression of 11 proteins. Pre-treatment of TRF altered the expression of 5 proteins while post-treatment and a continuous treatment of TRF in oxidative stress-induced worms affected the expression of 9 and 10 proteins respectively. Results: From these differentially expressed proteins, a total of 12 were successfully identified. TRF was found to increase the expression of glutathione-S transferase but decreased the expression of mRNA cap guanine-N7 methyltransferase, inorganic pyro-phosphatase, enoyle-CoA hydratase, vitellogenin 6 precursor, cathepsin B-like cysteine proteinase 4 precursor, triosephosphatase isomerase, tubulin-specific chaperon B and putative D-amino acid oxidase. In conclusion, TRF modulated the expression of proteins involved in energy metabolism, oxidative stress, proteolysis and biosynthesis of mRNA in C.elegans.