Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Future Choices 1 Running head: EFFECT OF FUTURE CHOICES The Effect of Highlighting Future Choices on Current Preferences

The research examines the effects of viewing a choice as one in a series of similar future choices rather than as an isolated choice. Our finding contrasts with the general wisdom that broader frames lead to exercising of greater self-control. We show that (a) in a choice between a vice and a virtue the share of the vice increases when the decision is presented as one of a series of similar future choices than if the same choice is viewed in isolation, and (b) the overall share of a vice increases when decisions are seen in connection with similar future choices. We propose that the context of similar future choices provides with a guilt-reducing justification to exert less selfcontrol in the present by allowing people to optimistically believe that they will exercise more self-control in future choices.
JN-00957-2004 : Final Accepted Version Title : Slow and fast inhibition and an h-current interact to create a theta rhythm in a model of CA 1 interneuron network

The Oriens-lacunosum moleculare (O-LM) subtype of interneuron is a key component in the formation of the theta rhythm (8 12 Hz) in the hippocampus. It is known that the CA1 region of the hippocampus can produce theta rhythms in vitro with all ionotropic excitation blocked, but the mechanisms by which this rhythmicity happens were previously unknown. Here we present a model suggesting that individual O-LM cells, by themselves, are capable of producing a single-cell theta -frequency firing, but coupled O-LM cells are not capable of producing a coherent population theta. By including in the model fast spiking (FS) interneurons, which give rise to IPSPs that decay faster than those of the O-LM cells, coherent theta rhythms are produced. The inhibition to O-LM cells from the FS cells, synchronizes the O-LM cells, but only when the FS cells themselves fire at a theta (or roughly multiple) frequency. Reciprocal connections from the O-LM cells to the FS cells serve to parse the FS cell firing into theta bursts, which can then synchronize the O-LM cells. A feature of the model O-LM cell critical to the synchronization mechanism is the hyperpolarization-activated h-current. The model can robustly reproduce relative phases of theta frequency activity in O-LM and FS cells.
Spherical harmonics expansion of the conduction band for deterministic simulation of SiGe HBTs with full band effects

A SiGe HBT is simulated using a deterministic Boltzmann equation solver with full band effects. An anisotropic band structure fitted to full band for high energies significantly improves the simulation of SiGe HBTs with a spherical harmonics expansion solver, especially when it comes to breakdown voltages. This makes it a more efficient alternative to stochastic Monte Carlo simulation.
Parallel News-Article Traffic Forecasting with ADMM

Predicting the traffic of an article, as measured by page views, is of great importance to content providers. Articles with increased traffic can improve advertising revenue and expand a provider’s user base. We propose a broadly applicable methodology incorporating meta-data and joint forecasting across articles, that involves solving a large optimization problem through the Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers (ADMM). We implement our solution using Spark, and evaluate it over a large corpus of articles and forecasting models. Our results demonstrate that our featurebased forecasting is both scalable as well as highly accurate, significantly improving forecasting predictions compared to traditional forecasting models.
The Clock is Still Ticking: Timing Attacks in the Modern Web

Web-based timing attacks have been known for over a decade, and it has been shown that, under optimal network conditions, an adversary can use such an attack to obtain information on the state of a user in a cross-origin website. In recent years, desktop computers have given way to laptops and mobile devices, which are mostly connected over a wireless or mobile network. These connections often do not meet the optimal conditions that are required to reliably perform cross-site timing attacks. In this paper, we show that modern browsers expose new side-channels that can be used to acquire accurate timing measurements, regardless of network conditions. Using several real-world examples, we introduce four novel web-based timing attacks against modern browsers and describe how an attacker can use them to obtain personal information based on a user's state on a cross-origin website. We evaluate our proposed attacks and demonstrate that they significantly outperform current attacks in terms of speed, reliability, and accuracy. Furthermore, we show that the nature of our attacks renders traditional defenses, i.e., those based on randomly delaying responses, moot and discuss possible server-side defense mechanisms.
Sensitivity-Based Hierarchical Controller Architectures for Active Suspension

In this brief, a sensitivity analysis of hierarchical fuzzy system (HFS) is conducted, allowing a sensitivity order of controller inputs to be established and used in a hierarchical fuzzy system inputs placement process. The frequency response analysis method is used to analyze the sensitivity of the controller output with respect to perturbation. This sensitivity knowledge thus constitutes a platform on which three different designs of HFS are investigated. An automotive active suspension system is chosen as an application for the HFS models for performance verification purposes. The simulation results are provided and discussed in this brief.
A harmonic canceller for hydraulic servo seismic system based on the parallel filtered-X adaptive notch filter

The hydraulic servo seismic system, the equipment simulating seismic signals in the lab environment, is widely applied to many industrial fields including aerospace, automobile, and architecture. When the system is driven by a sinusoidal command, the nonlinearity of the plant will cause frequency components at multiples of the command frequency appear at the plant output, which will cause unwanted discrepancies between the command and the feedback. A harmonic canceller based on the parallel filtered-X adaptive notch filter is proposed to eliminate the harmonics. It eliminates the harmonic by adding to the command a "cancelling signal" of the same frequency, and the model of the plant, which gives the LMS algorithm the critical phase information needed to adjust canceller coefficients, is introduced to make sure the signal output have the same amplitude but opposite polarity with the harmonic after propagating through the plant. And the parallel structure of the method, each of which dedicates to a single harmonic, can eliminate many harmonics simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed harmonic canceller can eliminate many harmonics simultaneously and the total harmonic distortion is greatly reduced.
Tracking Multiple Players using a Single Camera

It has been shown that multi-people tracking could be successfullly formulated as a Linear Program to process the output of multiple fixed and synchronized cameras with overlapping fields of view. In this paper, we extend this approach to the more challenging single-camera case and show that it yields excellent performance, even when the camera moves. We validate our approach on a number of basketball matches and argue that using a properly retrained people detector is key to producing the probabilities of presence that are used as input to the Linear Program.
A universal-phase rectifier architecture for rural telecom exchanges in developing countries

This paper describes a complete power plant architecture for rural telecom exchanges where grid power is unreliable. Telecom power plants are three phase rectifiers with isolated DC outputs which convert the grid AC input to a 48 V DC supply. In developing countries, significant power outages are experienced in rural and semi-urban areas. In these places, the power from the grid can be available in form of one, two or three phases during a day. The currently used power plants are not designed to handle this variation in input phases. Significant design effort is required to restructure the architecture of this power plant to solve this problem. In this paper, a simple approach is proposed to handle this situation. Currently used power plants have a rectifier followed by an isolated DC-DC converter. It is proposed that, a four leg diode bridge can be used instead of a three phase rectifier. The use of a four-leg bridge leads to automatic selection of active input phases without the need of any extra phase selection circuitry. The technique is easy to adapt in the currently used topologies. In order to reduce the voltage swing to subsequent isolated DC-DC stage, a clamped boost or buck stage is proposed. The resulting architecture has an operational input voltage between 90 V (rms) during single phase to 480 V (rms) during three phases. Passive power factor improvement techniques in form of, Ziogas filter, are used to improve the power factor. The complete topology of the power plant and its operation are explained in detail. The proposed system is verified using a 1 kW prototype.
Development of a Wearable Mobile Electrocardiogram Monitoring System by Using Novel Dry Foam Electrodes

The development of many telemedicine systems focus on the utility of communication techniques. However, the comfort of long-term Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring in daily life is necessary and is also an important unresolved issue. A wearable mobile electrocardiogram monitoring system (WMEMS) is proposed to monitor ECG in this study. It mainly consists of a wearable ECG acquisition device, a mobile phone platform, and a healthcare server. A novel dry foam electrode is also designed and embedded in the wearable ECG acquisition device. The novel dry foam electrode can provide good conductivity to acquire ECG effectively without conduction gels. By using the adapting property of the dry foam electrode, the skin-electrode impedance and the motion artifacts under movement can also be reduced by adapting to irregular skin surface. Moreover, by using the mobile phone as the system platform, the proposed WMEMS can monitor the user's ECG state continuously and anywhere in the globe if they are under the coverage of Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) cellular network. Finally, WMEMS is tested for detecting atrial fibrillation in the hospital. It really provides a good performance and is a good prototype for ECG telemedicine applications.
GA-based intelligent digital redesign of fuzzy-model-based controllers

Intelligent digital redesign involves converting a continuous-time fuzzy-model-based controller into an equivalent discrete-time counterpart for the digital control of continuous-time nonlinear systems by using the Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy models. In this paper, the authors present a new global state-matching intelligent digital redesign method for nonlinear systems by using genetic algorithms (GAs). More precisely, the intelligent digital redesign problem is converted to an equivalent optimization problem, and then GAs are adopted to find a solution. The search space, in which each problem variable is defined for GAs, are systematically obtained by the interval arithmetic operations. The proposed method results in global matching of the states of the analogously controlled system with those of the digitally controlled system while the conventional intelligent digital redesign method does not. The Chen's chaotic system is used as an illustrative example to show the effectiveness and the feasibility of the developed method. The proposed method provides a new approach for the digital redesign of a class of fuzzy-model-based controllers.
Does mentoring buffer women in science from the effects of perceived discrimination on career outcomes

Campbell, Emily. M.S., Purdue University, May 2016. Does Mentoring Buffer Women in Science from the Effects of Perceived Discrimination on Career Outcomes? Major Professor: Leslie Ashburn-Nardo. The number of women working in STEM areas of academia declines as rank progresses—a phenomenon termed the “leaky pipeline” (Burke, 2007). The leaky pipeline is due in part to discrimination. Women in STEM report high perceived discrimination, which is associated with negative career outcomes (Settles, Cortina, Stewart, & Malley, 2007; Pascoe & Richman, 2009). No research to date has examined whether mentoring might buffer the negative effects of perceived discrimination for female professors working in STEM areas of academia. This study examines whether mentoring relationships moderate the relationships between perceived discrimination and career outcomes including job satisfaction and work engagement for women in STEM. 118 women faculty in STEM completed an online survey of perceived discrimination, job satisfaction, and engagement. Although results revealed main effects of perceived discrimination and mentoring, mentoring did not moderate the relationship between perceived discrimination and outcomes. Exploratory analyses provide future research directions to understand the leaky pipeline.
Cortical function in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia

Abstract Objectives Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) are the most common causes of dementia; however, their overlapping clinical syndromes and involved brain regions make a differential diagnosis difficult. We aimed to identify the differences in the cognition and motor cortex excitability between AD and bvFTD patients. Methods Twenty-seven AD patients and 30 bvFTD patients were included in the study. Each participant received a neurological evaluation. Cognitive event-related potentials (P300) were recorded during an auditory oddball task. Next, the excitability of the motor cortex, including the resting, facilitated motor threshold (RMT and FMT) and cortical silent period (CSP), were assessed during transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Results The bvFTD patients exhibited significantly longer P300 latencies compared with AD patients. There was a significant negative correlation between cognition and P300 latency in the bvFTD group. The AD patients showed significantly reduced RMT and FMT values compared to the bvFTD group; however, no significant correlation was found between AD severity and the excitability of the motor cortex. Conclusions Cognition and motor cortical functions are different between AD and bvFTD patients. Noninvasive electrophysiological examinations have the potential to identify unique pathophysiological features that can be used to differentially diagnose AD and bvFTD patients.
Low Voltage Floating Gate MOS Transistor Based Four-Quadrant Multiplier

This paper presents a four-quadrant multiplier based on square-law characteristic of floating gate MOSFET (FGMOS) in saturation region. The proposed circuit uses square-difference identity and the differential voltage squarer proposed by Gupta et al. to implement the multiplication function. The proposed multiplier employs eight FGMOS transistors and two resistors only. The FGMOS implementation of the multiplier allows low voltage operation, reduced power consumption and minimum transistor count. The second order effects caused due to mobility degradation, component mismatch and temperature variations are discussed. Performance of the proposed circuit is verified at ±0.75 V in TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS, BSIM3 and Level 49 technology by using Cadence Spectre simulator.
Observational Constraints on Cosmology from the Modified Friedmann Equation

Recent measurements of Type Ia supernovae, as well as other concordant observations, suggest that the expansion of our universe is accelerating. A dark energy component has usually been invoked as the most feasible mechanism for the acceleration. However, effects arising from possible extra dimensions can mimic dark energy through a modified Friedmann equation. In this work, we investigate some observational constraints on a scenario in which this modification is given by H2 = (8πG/3)(ρ + Cρn). We mainly focus our attention on the constraints from recent measurements of the dimensionless coordinate distances to Type Ia supernovae and Fanaroff-Riley Type IIb radio galaxies compiled by Daly & Djorgovski and the X-ray gas mass fractions in clusters of galaxies published by Allen et al. We obtain the confidence region on the power index n and the density parameter Ωm of the universe from a combined analysis of these databases. We find that n = 0.06 and Ωm = 0.30, at the 95.4% confidence level, which is consistent within the errors with the standard ΛCDM model. These parameter ranges give a universe whose expansion switches from deceleration to acceleration at a redshift between 0.52 to 0.73.
TCBC: Trap Caching Bounds Checking for C

In this paper, we propose a debugging technique for C, which can dynamically find boundary errors on strings in a highly-compatible, accurate and efficient manner. The main idea of our technique is to effectively keep track of hazardous memory bounds (called trap regions) using a small table (called a trap cache) on the static section of the instrumented program. We have implemented our technique as an extension of GCC4.1. 1 and conducted experiments. The results show that our technique was easily applicable even to large real programs including Apache 1.3. 37 and Linux 2.6. 20.4 without requiring significant manual effort, it successfully detected all of ten known boundary errors in them with no false positives, and it incurred low run-time overheads (average 17%) for their benchmarks.
Ideal Cardiovascular Health: Associations With Biomarkers and Subclinical Disease and Impact on Incidence of Cardiovascular Disease in the Framingham Offspring Study

Background— The American Heart Association Cardiovascular Health score (CVH score) is inversely associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) incidence, but the mechanisms underlying this association warrant exploration. Methods and Results— We related the CVH score to circulating biomarkers and prevalent subclinical CVD (defined as ≥1 of the following: increased carotid intima-media thickness or stenosis, left ventricular hypertrophy [by ECG or echocardiography], left ventricular systolic dysfunction, microalbuminuria, and a reduced ankle-brachial index) in 2680 Framingham Study participants (mean age, 58 years; 55% women). After adjustment for age and sex, an ideal CVH score (nonsmoking status, ideal body mass index, regular physical activity, healthy diet, and an optimal profile of serum cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose; 1 point for each) was associated with higher circulating concentrations of natriuretic peptides (N-terminal pro-atrial natriuretic peptide and B-type natriuretic peptide) and lower blood concentrations of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1, aldosterone, C-reactive protein, D-dimer, fibrinogen, homocysteine, and growth differentiation factor-15 levels (P<0.001 for all), as well as lower odds of subclinical disease (odds ratio, 0.74 per 1-unit increase in CVH score; 95% confidence interval, 0.68–0.80). The incidence of CVD (267 events over 16 years) was inversely associated with the CVH score in age- and sex-adjusted models (hazard ratio, 0.77 per 1-unit increase in CVH score; 95% confidence interval, 0.70–0.86), which was slightly attenuated upon adjustment for biomarkers and subclinical disease (hazard ratio, 0.87; 95% confidence interval, 0.78–0.97). Conclusion— In our prospective community-based study, the inverse association between an ideal cardiovascular health score and CVD incidence was partly attributable to its favorable impact on CVD biomarker levels and subclinical disease.
The Industrial District Model : An Entrepreneurial Overview

The aim of this paper is to provide a description of the entrepreneurial dynamics within the industrial district (henceforth: ID) model. The main background premises refer to the relevance of the division of labour for the entrepreneurial development of a region and to the roles played by intangible resources (as social capital and human capital) in such processes. In particular, the work according to these co-ordinates provides a classification, arising out of the basic literature in such research fields, about the entrepreneurial “sparks” generating such regional clusters.
Control of multiple heterogeneous magnetic micro-robots on non-specialized surfaces

In this work, we develop methods for controlling multiple untethered magnetic micro-robots (called Mag-µBots), with all dimensions under 1 mm, without the need for a specialized surface. We investigate sets of Mag-µBots that are geometrically and magnetically designed to respond uniquely to the same magnetic fields. The responses of geometrically dissimilar Mag-µBots with similar magnetization and a group of identically-fabricated Mag-µBots are investigated. By controlling the magnetic field waveforms, individual and subgroups of Mag-µBots are able to locomote in a parallel but dissimilar fashion. Specifically, the pulsing frequency of the imposed driving magnetic fields is used as a selection method among the Mag-µBots. This method for accomplishing motion discrimination is discussed, modeled, and tested. Independent global positioning of two and three robots is demonstrated in two-dimensional space. While individual Mag-µBot velocities can be as high as 7 mm/s, the effective velocities during multi-robot control are found to be up to 2 mm/s. As this control method is accomplished without the use of a specialized surface, it has potential applications in areas such as micro-fluidic systems and bio-manipulation
A Queuing Model for Evaluating the Transfer Latency of Peer-to-Peer Systems

This paper presents a queuing model to evaluate the latency associated with file transfers or replications in peer-to-peer (P2P) computer systems. The main contribution of this paper is a modeling framework for the peers that accounts for the file size distribution, the search time, load distribution at peers, and number of concurrent downloads allowed by a peer. We propose a queuing model that models the nodes or peers in such systems as M/G/1/K processor sharing queues. The model is extended to account for peers which alternate between online and offline states. The proposed queuing model for the peers is combined with a single class open queuing network for the routers interconnecting the peers to obtain the overall file transfer latency. We also show that in scenarios with multipart downloads from different peers, a rate proportional allocation strategy minimizes the download times.
The Blizzard Challenge 2007

In Blizzard 2007, the third Blizzard Challenge, participants were asked to build voices from a dataset, a defined subset and, following certain constraints, a subset of their choice. A set of test sentences was then released to be synthesised. An online evaluation of the submitted synthesised sentences focused on naturalness and intelligibility, and added new sections for degree of similarity to the original speaker, and similarity in terms of naturalness of pairs of sentences from different systems. We summarise this year’s Blizzard Challenge and look ahead to possible designs for Blizzard 2008 in the light of participant and listener feedback.