Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Research Article: Membership in Voluntary Organizations on the Colorado Plateau: A Reexamination of the Technical Information Quandary

Many scholars note the increasing desire of the public to be involved in the policy process. Others observe, however, that public participation in governance is declining. One possible explanation for this is that people do not know the technical and scientific language that is frequently used in these decision processes. Citizens simply lack the information to participate in a meaningful way. This is what is known as the “technical information quandary” (i.e., how citizen desires for increased participation can be balanced against the increasingly technical nature of public policy). Research on public participation suggests membership in voluntary associations or organizations is positively associated with higher levels of technical policy knowledge. Recreation management on the Colorado Plateau provides an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between membership in voluntary organizations and the level of policy knowledge. In 1998, we surveyed the public living on the Colorado Plateau to ascertain their level of knowledge of technical terms and their level of participation in voluntary organizations. We found that a variety of factors were related to people's membership in these organizations. In particular, our findings indicate that those with higher levels of knowledge were significantly more likely to be members of voluntary organizations and that this knowledge was most likely to come from the organizations. These findings have important implications for environmental managers, as well as for the voluntary organizations themselves.
Performance and energy efficiency of mobile data offloading with mobility prediction and prefetching

We present a detailed evaluation of procedures that exploit mobility prediction and prefetching to enhance offloading of traffic from mobile networks to WiFi hotspots, for both delay tolerant and delay sensitive traffic. We consider empirical measurements and evaluate the percentage of offloaded traffic, data transfer delay, and energy consumption of the proposed procedures. Our results illustrate how various factors such as mobile, WiFi and hotspot backhaul throughput, data size, number of hotspots, along with time and throughput estimation errors, influence the performance and energy efficiency of mobile data offloading enhanced with mobility prediction and prefetching.
Backscatter ultraviolet instrument solar diffuser degradation

All but one of the backscatter UV (BUV) instruments have used solar reflective diffusers made of ground aluminum to maintain instrument calibration after launch. These diffusers have been sued throughout mission life-times, which range from less than 1 years to over 14 years. Means for monitoring diffuser reflectance include mechanisms on the instruments as well as methods to infer reflectance using earth radiance data. We compare changes in diffuser reflectance for the various instruments and find some common behavior as well as significant differences. Changes which appear to occur at different rates are actually quite similar when corrections are made for the amount and direction of incident solar irradiation. However, a class of instruments, the SBUV/2, has significantly lower degradation rates. We find, as have previous authors, that spacecraft self-contamination is the most likely cause of diffuser changes and observed differences. Observed changes suggest that contaminant layer thickness is the main reflectance degradation mechanism in the first few years of operation.
GDM: device memory management for gpgpu computing

GPGPUs are evolving from dedicated accelerators towards mainstream commodity computing resources. During the transition, the lack of system management of device memory space on GPGPUs has become a major hurdle. In existing GPGPU systems, device memory space is still managed explicitly by individual applications, which not only increases the burden of programmers but can also cause application crashes, hangs, or low performance. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of GDM, a fully functional GPGPU device memory manager to address the above problems and unleash the computing power of GPGPUs in general-purpose environments. To effectively coordinate the device memory usage of different applications, GDM takes control over device memory allocations and data transfers to and from device memory, leveraging a buffer allocated in each application's virtual memory. GDM utilizes the unique features of GPGPU systems and relies on several effective optimization techniques to guarantee the efficient usage of device memory space and to achieve high performance. We have evaluated GDM and compared it against state-of-the-art GPGPU system software on a range of workloads. The results show that GDM can prevent applications from crashes, including those induced by device memory leaks, and improve system performance by up to 43%.
Detecting inconsistencies in distributed data

One of the central problems for data quality is inconsistency detection. Given a database D and a set ¿ of dependencies as data quality rules, we want to identify tuples in D that violate some rules in ¿. When D is a centralized database, there have been effective SQL-based techniques for finding violations. It is, however, far more challenging when data in D is distributed, in which inconsistency detection often necessarily requires shipping data from one site to another. This paper develops techniques for detecting violations of conditional functional dependencies (CFDs) in relations that are fragmented and distributed across different sites. (1) We formulate the detection problem in various distributed settings as optimization problems, measured by either network traffic or response time. (2)We show that it is beyond reach in practice to find optimal detection methods: the detection problem is NP-complete when the data is partitioned either horizontally or vertically, and when we aim to minimize either data shipment or response time. (3) For data that is horizontally partitioned, we provide several algorithms to find violations of a set of CFDs, leveraging the structure of CFDs to reduce data shipment or increase parallelism. (4) We verify experimentally that our algorithms are scalable on large relations and complex CFDs. (5) For data that is vertically partitioned, we provide a characterization for CFDs to be checked locally without requiring data shipment, in terms of dependency preservation. We show that it is intractable to minimally refine a partition and make it dependency preserving.
Evaluation of aerosol direct radiative forcing in MIRAGE

A variety of measurements have been used to evaluate the treatment of aerosol radiative properties and radiative impacts of aerosols simulated by the Model for Integrated Research on Atmospheric Global Exchange (MIRAGE). The treatment of water uptake in MIRAGE agrees with laboratory measurements, and the growth of aerosol extinction with relative humidity in MIRAGE simulations agrees with field measurements. The simulated frequency of relative humidity near 100% is about twice that of analyzed relative humidity. When the analyzed relative humidity is used to calculate aerosol water uptake in MIRAGE, the simulated aerosol optical depth agrees with most surface measurements after cloudy conditions are filtered out and differences between model and station elevations are accounted for, but simulated optical depths are too low over Brazil and central Canada. Simulated optical depths are mostly within a factor of 2 of satellite estimates, but are too high off the east coasts of the United States and China and too low off the coast of West Africa and in the Arabian Sea. The simulated single-scatter albedo is consistent with surface measurements. MIRAGE correctly simulates a larger Angstrom exponent near regions with emissions of submicron particles and aerosol precursor gases, and a smaller exponent near regions with emissions of coarse particles. The simulated sensitivity of radiative forcing to aerosol optical depth is consistent with estimates from measurements. The simulated direct forcing is within the uncertainty of estimates from measurements in the North Atlantic.
Overexpression of miR-155 in clear-cell renal cell carcinoma and its oncogenic effect through targeting FOXO3a

MicroRNA-155 (miR-155) is overexpressed in numerous human cancer types and has an oncogenic role. Previous study has revealed that miR-155 serves an important role in the progression of clear-cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC); however, the underlying mechanism was not completely clarified. The present study aimed to investigate the biological role of miR-155 in ccRCC and the underlying molecular mechanisms. The expression of miR-155 in 20 ccRCC and adjacent normal kidney tissues was determined by PCR. After downregulation of miR-155 expression by miR-155 inhibitor, cell growth was assessed by MTT and colony formation assays. Apoptosis and cell cycle distribution were analyzed by flow cytometry. Cell invasion and migration was detected by wound healing and Transwell assays. Furthermore, forkhead box O3a (FOXO3a) mRNA and protein expression were detected by PCR and immunoblotting. The expression of FOXO3a in 20 ccRCC tissues was also examined by immunohistochemistry. The expression of miR-155 was upregulated in ccRCC tissues compared to that in adjacent normal tissues. Inhibition of miR-155 significantly suppressed the proliferation, colony formation, migration and invasion, and induced G1 arrest and apoptosis of ccRCC cells in vitro. Moreover, inhibition of miR-155 significantly upregulated FOXO3a expression, and miR-155 expression was inversely correlated with FOXO3a expression in ccRCC tissues. In conclusion, miR-155 may have an important role in the genesis of ccRCC through targeting FOXO3a and may be a potential target for ccRCC therapy.
Energy budget above a temperate mixed forest in northeastern China

Components of the energy budget were measured continuously above a 300‐year‐old temperate mixed forest at the Changbaishan site, northeastern China, from 1 January to 31 December 2003, as a part of the ChinaFlux programme. The albedo values above the canopy were lower than most temperate forests, and the values for snow‐covered canopy were over 50% higher than for the snow‐free canopy. In winter, net radiation Rn was generally less than 5% of the summer value due to high albedo and low incoming solar radiation. The annual mean latent heat LE was 37·5 W m−2, accounting for 52% of Rn. The maximum daily evaporation was about 4·6 mm day−1 in summer. Over the year, the accumulated precipitation was 578 mm; this compares with 493 mm of evapotranspiration, which shows that more than 85% of water was returned to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration. The LE was strongly affected by the transpiration activity and increased quickly as the broadleaved trees began to foliate. The sensible heat H dropped at that time, although Rn increased. Consequently, the seasonal variation in the Bowen ratio β was clearly U‐shaped, and the minimum value (0·1) occurred on a sunny day just after rain, when most of the available energy was used for evapotranspiration. Negative β values occurred occasionally in the non‐growing season as a result of intensive radiative cooling and the presence of water on the surface. The β was very high (up to 13·0) in snow‐covered winter, when evapotranspiration was small due to low surface temperature and available soil water. Vegetation phenology and soil moisture were the key variables controlling the available energy partitioning between H and LE. Energy budget closure averaged better than 86% on a half‐hourly basis, with slightly greater closure on a daily basis. The degree of closure showed a dependence on friction velocity u*. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Offline Cursive Bengali Word Recognition Using CNNs with a Recurrent Model

This paper deals with offline handwritten word recognition of a major Indic script: Bengali. Due to the structure of this script, the characters (mostly ortho-syllables) are frequently overlapping and hard to segment, especially when the writing is cursive. Individual character recognition and the combination of outputs can increase the likelihood of errors. Instead, a better approach can be sending the whole word to a suitable recognizer. Here we use the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) integrated with a recurrent model for this purpose. Long short-term memory blocks are used as hidden units. Also, the CNN-derived features are employed in a recurrent model with a CTC (Connectionist Temporal Classification) layer to get the output. We have tested our method on three datasets: (a) a publicly available dataset, (b) a new dataset generated by our research group and (c) an unconstrained dataset. The dataset (a) contains 17,091 words, while our dataset (b) contains 107,550 number of words in total. In addition to these, the dataset (c) is comprised of 5,223 words. We have compared our results with those of some earlier work in the area and have found improved performance, which is due to the novel integration of CNNs with the recurrent model.
Bitgroup modeling of signal data for image compression

Summary form only given. Binary variable order adaptive algorithms like the UMC of Rissanen (1986) and JBIG can be used to losslessly compress non-binary data by splitting the data into planes, each of 1 bit resolution, and passing each plane to a separate instance of the algorithm. The UMC algorithm operated in this way is the most powerful lossless signal data compressor the authors are aware of. We attempt to develop an understanding of why this approach is so effective. We investigate the common technique of Gray coding the data before splitting it into single-bit planes and passing to the modeler and coder, and compare it to a simple weighted binary coding. We then propose a non-binary pseudo-Gray code as a method of generating planes of resolution greater than or equal to 1 bit, and compare it with the other conventional methods. The algorithm to generate the pseudo-Gray code is much the same as that for the construction of a binary Gray code, except that instead of minimizing the Hamming distance between neighboring bit planes, we instead minimize the Euclidean distance between adjacent groups of bit planes.
Objective Prediction of the Sound Quality of Music Processed by an Adaptive Feedback Canceller

Adaptive feedback cancellers in hearing aids can produce unpleasant sounding distortion artifacts (entrainment) in response to periodic inputs, including music. Reliable objective metrics that predict user-perceived distortion could significantly reduce development costs for new hearing aids. The aim of this study was to gain insight into the ability of different objective metrics to predict subjective ratings of the sound quality of music processed by adaptive feedback cancellation. The metrics tested consisted of perceptual measures from established audio quality models (including Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality (PEAQ), PEMO-Q and . Rnonlin). Neural networks were used to map between the values of the perceptual measures and a subjective scale of perceived quality. Training data consisted of values of perceptual measures obtained from ten different excerpts of orchestral music processed by a simplified model of a hearing aid with an adaptive feedback canceller, and corresponding subjective quality ratings from 27 normal hearing subjects. An optimal combination of perceptual measures to use as inputs to a network input was found using an extended Fourier amplitude sensitivity test (EFAST). Our results suggest that the most salient inputs to a multivariate model of measured quality ratings consist of perceptual measures related to spectral noise loudness, modulation differences between clean and processed signals, and correlation-based measurement of nonlinear distortion. The intraclass correlation between mean subjective ratings and the output of a network combining these perceptual measures was high , which compares favorably to results from previous studies of perceptual quality metrics applied to audio signals with other forms of noise or distortion.
Multi-Dimensional Dynamics of Human Electromagnetic Brain Activity

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) are invaluable neuroscientific tools for unveiling human neural dynamics in three dimensions (space, time, and frequency), which are associated with a wide variety of perceptions, cognition, and actions. MEG/EEG also provides different categories of neuronal indices including activity magnitude, connectivity, and network properties along the three dimensions. In the last 20 years, interest has increased in inter-regional connectivity and complex network properties assessed by various sophisticated scientific analyses. We herein review the definition, computation, short history, and pros and cons of connectivity and complex network (graph-theory) analyses applied to MEG/EEG signals. We briefly describe recent developments in source reconstruction algorithms essential for source-space connectivity and network analyses. Furthermore, we discuss a relatively novel approach used in MEG/EEG studies to examine the complex dynamics represented by human brain activity. The correct and effective use of these neuronal metrics provides a new insight into the multi-dimensional dynamics of the neural representations of various functions in the complex human brain.
Data Allocation and Transaction Processing in Distributed Database Systems

Distributed database processing requires the transmission of data between computers in a distributed system. Data transmission is becoming an increasingly attractive data-dissemination method for large database systems. In order to effectively utilize distributed query processing, it is necessary to have efficient dynamic allocation algorithms that can balance individual and overall performance and can scale in terms of table and query size, incoming transactions and routing bandwidth. We investigate dynamic transaction processing strategies for locally distributed database systems in which the database is partitioned and distributed among multiple transaction processing systems and the incoming transactions are routed by a common front-end computer system. In view of this fact, we describe new dynamic transaction processing methods which take into account routing history and minimizes the estimated response time of incoming transactions and can be tuned to trade off average and worst-case waiting time.
Functional Analysis of Porphyromonas gingivalis W83 CRISPR-Cas Systems

ABSTRACT The CRISPR-Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated genes) system provides prokaryotic cells with an adaptive and heritable immune response to foreign genetic elements, such as viruses, plasmids, and transposons. It is present in the majority of Archaea and almost half of species of Bacteria. Porphyromonas gingivalis is an important human pathogen that has been proven to be an etiological agent of periodontitis and has been linked to systemic conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and cardiovascular disease. At least 95% of clinical strains of P. gingivalis carry CRISPR arrays, suggesting that these arrays play an important function in vivo. Here we show that all four CRISPR arrays present in the P. gingivalis W83 genome are transcribed. For one of the arrays, we demonstrate in vivo activity against double-stranded DNA constructs containing protospacer sequences accompanied at the 3′ end by an NGG protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM). Most of the 44 spacers present in the genome of P. gingivalis W83 share no significant similarity with any known sequences, although 4 spacers are similar to sequences from bacteria found in the oral cavity and the gastrointestinal tract. Four spacers match genomic sequences of the host; however, none of these is flanked at its 3′ terminus by the appropriate PAM element. IMPORTANCE The CRISPR-Cas (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated genes) system is a unique system that provides prokaryotic cells with an adaptive and heritable immunity. In this report, we show that the CRISPR-Cas system of P. gingivalis, an important human pathogen associated with periodontitis and possibly also other conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and cardiovascular disease, is active and provides protection from foreign genetic elements. Importantly, the data presented here may be useful for better understanding the communication between cells in larger bacterial communities and, consequently, the process of disease development and progression.
Dishevelled Binds the Discs Large ‘Hook’ Domain to Activate GukHolder-Dependent Spindle Positioning in Drosophila

Communication between cortical cell polarity cues and the mitotic spindle ensures proper orientation of cell divisions within complex tissues. Defects in mitotic spindle positioning have been linked to various developmental disorders and have recently emerged as a potential contributor to tumorigenesis. Despite the importance of this process to human health, the molecular mechanisms that regulate spindle orientation are not fully understood. Moreover, it remains unclear how diverse cortical polarity complexes might cooperate to influence spindle positioning. We and others have demonstrated spindle orientation roles for Dishevelled (Dsh), a key regulator of planar cell polarity, and Discs large (Dlg), a conserved apico-basal cell polarity regulator, effects which were previously thought to operate within distinct molecular pathways. Here we identify a novel direct interaction between the Dsh-PDZ domain and the alternatively spliced “I3-insert” of the Dlg-Hook domain, thus establishing a potential convergent Dsh/Dlg pathway. Furthermore, we identify a Dlg sequence motif necessary for the Dsh interaction that shares homology to the site of Dsh binding in the Frizzled receptor. Expression of Dsh enhanced Dlg-mediated spindle positioning similar to deletion of the Hook domain. This Dsh-mediated activation was dependent on the Dlg-binding partner, GukHolder (GukH). These results suggest that Dsh binding may regulate core interdomain conformational dynamics previously described for Dlg. Together, our results identify Dlg as an effector of Dsh signaling and demonstrate a Dsh-mediated mechanism for the activation of Dlg/GukH-dependent spindle positioning. Cooperation between these two evolutionarily-conserved cell polarity pathways could have important implications to both the development and maintenance of tissue homeostasis in animals.
A 1.1 GHz first 64 b generation 2900 microprocessor

The first 64 b S/390 microprocessor implemented in a 0.18 /spl mu/m, 7-level copper interconnect bulk CMOS process, runs operating system and applications at 1.1 GHz. The frequency is achieved with interconnect width and repeater optimization, selective use of low-Vt devices, tapered library gates, and improved synthesis and circuit tuning algorithms.
Texture Segmentation Using Fractal Dimension

This paper deals with the problem of recognizing and segmenting textures in images. For this purpose the authors employ a technique based on the fractal dimension (FD) and the multi-fractal concept. Six FD features are based on the original image, the above average/high gray level image, the below average/low gray level image, the horizontally smoothed image, the vertically smoothed image, and the multi-fractal dimension of order two. A modified box-counting approach is proposed to estimate the FD, in combination with feature smoothing in order to reduce spurious regions. To segment a scene into the desired number of classes, an unsupervised K-means like clustering approach is used. Mosaics of various natural textures from the Brodatz album as well as microphotographs of thin sections of natural rocks are considered, and the segmentation results to show the efficiency of the technique. Supervised techniques such as minimum-distance and k-nearest neighbor classification are also considered. The results are compared with other techniques. >