Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electronic structures and lattice dynamics of BaTiO3 and BiFeO3 : a comparative first-principles study

First-principles calculations were performed to investigate the ferroelectric properties of barium titanate and bismuth ferrite, as well as phonon dispersion of BaTiO3, using density functional theory and density functional perturbation theory. Results show that the strong hybridization of Ti-O and Bi-O lead to the corresponding mechanisms for stabilizing the distorted structure. The spontaneous polarization of 59.4 \mu C/cm2 and 27.6 \mu C/cm2 were calculated for BiFeO3 and BaTiO3 respectively, using berry phase method within the modern theory of polarization. The stereochemical activity of Bi-6s long-pair, which was the driven mechanism for ferroelectricity in BiFeO3, was able to produce greater polarization than the Ti off-centring displacement in BaTiO3. New multiferroic perovskite type materials combined with these two ferroelectric instabilities were predicted to have a better ferromagnetic ordering in comparison with BiFeO3.
Supramolecular structures of three configurational isomers of 1-phenylethanaminium malate(1-).

In rac-1-phenyl­ethanaminium rac-malate(1−), C8H12N+·C4H5O5−, (I), the anions are linked by two inter-anion O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds into sheets generated by a glide plane and hence containing both enantiomers of the anion. The cations are linked to the anion sheets by three N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, such that cations of R configuration are bonded to one face of the sheet and cations of S configuration are bonded to the other face. In (R)-1-phenyl­ethanaminium (S)-malate(1−), C8H12N+·C4H5O5−, (III), the anions are again linked by two O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, in one of which the H atom is disordered over two sites, into sheets very similar to those in (I) but which are generated in (III) by translation and so contain only a single enantiomer. The cations in (III) are linked to the anion sheets by three N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, but the cations are bonded to only one face of the anion sheet. Co-crystallization of (R)-1-phenyl­ethanamine with rac-­malic acid gives the salt (R)-1-phenyl­ethanaminium malate(1−) C8H12N+·C4H5O5−, (II), with a structure very similar to that of (III) but where only ca 75% of the anion sites are occupied by (S)-malate(1−), with the remaining 25% occupied by (R)-malate(1−). The layers in (II) show a significant displacement along the [001] direction compared with those in (III).
A&a Manuscript No. Search for Prompt Radio Emission of Gamma-ray Bursts

A conducting reball expanding at relativistic speed into an ambient magnetic eld generates a rapidly changing electric current which emits coherent electromagnetic radiation at radio frequencies. The critical frequency (upper limit of the emission) strongly depends on the Lorentz factor of the expansion. We have searched for simultaneous radio emission in the data of solar radio spectrographs at times when BATSE reported a non-solar gamma-ray burst (GRB) within the beams of the radio telescopes. Solar spectrographs are less sensitive than single frequency receivers, but yield a broad overview on the spectrum ideal for discriminating against atmospheric and man-made interference. In 7 well-observed cases no radio emission was found. This puts upper and lower limits on the Lorentz factor of the reball expansion in GRBs if the source distance is less than 1 kpc, i.e. if GRBs are local. The coherent expansion radiation is not observable with current instruments if the GRB sources are at 1 kpc.
First leaps toward jumping microrobots

This paper presents the first results for jumping robots at millimeter size scales. Jumping at small sizes requires the quick release of stored energy to accelerate the robot to its takeoff velocity. Two approaches to this energy release are considered. The first is similar to the method used by most larger jumping robots and insects; energy is stored mechanically and generates thrust against the ground upon release. A new microfabrication process incorporates polymer springs for the robot leg and the resulting 4mm × 4mm × 0.3mm jumping mechanism has been launched over 32 cm into the air by hand. The second approach utilizes stored chemical energy and generates thrust by expelling gas from a chemical reaction. This energetic material has been combined with sensing, control, and power on a 4mm × 7mm × 4mm polymer chassis, and jumps in response to light stimuli have reached 8 cm in height.
Parallel occlusion culling on GPUs cluster

Occlusion culling, level-of-detail and parallel rendering are key techniques to accelerate interactively rendering of large dataset. Although each of these techniques has been independently researched to an extensive degree and some systems have been developed to combine them together. Unfortunately, parallel occlusion culling, i. e. distributing the computation of occlusion culling onto multiple computing nodes such as a CPUs cluster or GPUs cluster, has rarely been touched partly because most of existing occlusion culling algorithms do not scale well when parallelized.To address this issue, we first introduce a novel occlusion culling algorithm which uses occlusion query function provided by current GPUs and adopts a visibility predictor based on temporal coherence to reduce the count of occlusion queries. Furthermore, different schemes to parallelize this occlusion culling algorithm on a GPUs cluster are proposed including data parallelism schemes and functionality parallelism schemes. Data parallelism scheme decomposes data for occlusion culling into separate parts and maps the computation of them onto different cluster nodes for parallel processing. Functionality parallelism scheme assembles multiple cluster nodes as an occlusion culling pipeline which outputs steady image stream. We show a number of viable solutions to the special problems on parallelizing this occlusion culling algorithm, such as the transferring of data dependency and the load-balancing of occlusion culling pipeline. We report on the experimental results to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed parallelism schemes based on the novel occlusion culling algorithm.
Distributed detection of debris flows on a wireless sensor network

Debris flows are very destructive phenomena that cause damage to population living near rivers. Current warning systems for these phenomena are based on fixed instrumentation located at certain points through the river or indirectly, through remote measurements; as a result, the information they provide is limited, as it lacks real-time and precise data about the event location and its speed. In this paper, we introduce a set of algorithms and protocols for debris flows detection in rivers, using a wireless sensor network. The proposed detection protocol is distributed and decentralized, as it does not rely on a central coordinator to decide on the presence of the event. The proposed algorithms and protocols were evaluated on a simulator, in order to evaluate its performance. Results show that the algorithms are capable of detecting the phenomenon and alert people in the danger area with enough anticipation to prevent a tragedy.
Experience Design in Ubiquitous Computing

pervasive mobile computing, consumer experience The technologies underlying ubiquitous computing are beginning to move from research laboratories into the real world. As they do so, the value to users of this new paradigm will begin to emerge. We believe that one potentially valuable area of application of ubiquitous computing will be in the delivery of Situated Digital Experiences, i.e. compelling consumer experiences delivered by digital technology that reflect and enhance their physical locations. In this paper, we outline a research program in the design of such experiences and describe two case studies involving experimental deployments. We also describe a provisional model of consumer experience that is emerging from the research and indicate some aspects of future work.
The Chloroplast Genome of the Green Alga Schizomeris leibleinii (Chlorophyceae) Provides Evidence for Bidirectional DNA Replication from a Single Origin in the Chaetophorales

In the Chlorophyceae, the chloroplast genome is extraordinarily fluid in architecture and displays unique features relative to other groups of green algae. For the Chaetophorales, 1 of the 5 major lineages of the Chlorophyceae, it has been shown that the distinctive architecture of the 223,902-bp genome of Stigeoclonium helveticum is consistent with bidirectional DNA replication from a single origin. Here, we report the 182,759-bp chloroplast genome sequence of Schizomeris leibleinii, a member of the earliest diverging lineage of the Chaetophorales. Like its Stigeoclonium homolog, the Schizomeris genome lacks a large inverted repeat encoding the rRNA operon and displays a striking bias in coding regions that is associated with a bias in base composition along each strand. Our results support the notion that these two chaetophoralean genomes replicate bidirectionally from a putative origin located in the vicinity of the small subunit ribosomal RNA gene. Their shared structural characteristics were most probably inherited from the common ancestor of all chaetophoralean algae. Short dispersed repeats account for most of the 41-kb size variation between the Schizomeris and Stigeoclonium genomes, and there is no indication that homologous recombination between these repeated elements led to the observed gene rearrangements. A comparison of the extent of variation sustained by the Stigeoclonium and Schizomeris chloroplast DNAs (cpDNAs) with that observed for the cpDNAs of the chlamydomonadalean Chlamydomonas and Volvox suggests that gene rearrangements as well as changes in the abundance of intergenic and intron sequences occurred at a slower pace in the Chaetophorales than in the Chlamydomonadales.
System mechanisms for partial rollback of mobile agent execution

Mobile agent technology has been proposed for various fault-sensitive application areas, including electronic commerce, systems management and active messaging. Recently proposed protocols providing the exactly-once execution of mobile agents allow the usage of mobile agents in these application areas. Based on these protocols, a mechanism for the application-initiated partial rollback of the agent execution is presented. The rollback mechanism uses compensation operations to roll back the effects of the agent execution on the resources and uses a mixture of physical logging and compensation operations to roll back the state of the agent. The introduction of different types of compensation operations allows performance improvements during the agent rollback.
A Constrained Growth Method for Procedural Floor Plan Generation

Modern games often feature highly detailed urban environments. However, buildings are typically represented only by their facade, because of the excessive costs it would entail to model all building interiors of a city by hand. Although there exist automated procedural techniques for building interiors, their application is to date limited. One of the reasons for this is because designers have too little control over the resulting room topology. Furthermore, generated floor plans do not always adhere to the necessary consistency constraints, such as reachability and connectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible technique for generating procedural floor plans subject to userdefined constraints We demonstrate its versatility, by showing generated floor plans for different classes of buildings, some of which consist of serveral connected floors. It is concluded that this method results in plausible floor plans, over which a designer has control by defining functional constraints. Furthermore, the method is efficient and easy to implement and integrated into the larger context of procedural modeling of urban environments.
Supporting GPU sharing in cloud environments with a transparent runtime consolidation framework

Driven by the emergence of GPUs as a major player in high performance computing and the rapidly growing popularity of cloud environments, GPU instances are now being offered by cloud providers. The use of GPUs in a cloud environment, however, is still at initial stages, and the challenge of making GPU a true shared resource in the cloud has not yet been addressed. This paper presents a framework to enable applications executing within virtual machines to transparently share one or more GPUs. Our contributions are twofold: we extend an open source GPU virtualization software to include efficient GPU sharing, and we propose solutions to the conceptual problem of GPU kernel consolidation. In particular, we introduce a method for computing the affinity score between two or more kernels, which provides an indication of potential performance improvements upon kernel consolidation. In addition, we explore molding as a means to achieve efficient GPU sharing also in the case of kernels with high or conflicting resource requirements. We use these concepts to develop an algorithm to efficiently map a set of kernels on a pair of GPUs. We extensively evaluate our framework using eight popular GPU kernels and two Fermi GPUs. We find that even when contention is high our consolidation algorithm is effective in improving the throughput, and that the runtime overhead of our framework is low.
The impact of income distribution on consumption: a reassessment

For some Post Keynesian economists, functional income distribution affects economic activity and growth through its effects on investment, consumption and net exports. This study focuses on econometric issues about the consumption function. Post Keynesians generally fail to find a long-run relation between consumption, wages, profits and wealth. However, taking close econometric specifications, Neoclassical get this kind of relation. We lean on this result in order to re-examine the relation between income distribution and consumption. The empirical analysis applies on U.S. quarterly data for the period 1960-2007.
Lexical marking of discourse relations - some experimental findings

Both in written and in spoken language, discourse relations may or may not be signalled by lexical material. In this paper we present the results of two experiments which were intended to answer some questions concerning the relationship between discourse relations and their lexical markers. Assuming that , in any case, discourse relations are inferred by the addressee/interpreter, the question arises about what suggests to the speaker/writer the strategical decision of using rather than not using explicit signals, such as connectives or cue phrases. In order to answer this main question, the following subquestions need to be answered: first, which role do discourse markers play in the task of reconstructing the discourse relation which was originally intended by the speaker/writer. Second, to what extent the lexical signalling of the relation is essential for the relation to be inferred. Third, whether there are coherence relations that are always lexically signalled and whether there are any that are never lexically signalled. Finally, if the different access that addressees have to the linguistic context in spoken and written language affects the kind of relations employed in the construction of text and/or in the realization of the relations. 1 D i s c o u r s e R e l a t i o n s Discourse relations have been addressed by a number of different approaches for the purposes of text understanding, text analysis and text planning. This results not only in a difference in the theoretical interpretations of the concept, but also in a heterogeneity among the actual sets of relations which are assumed to be psychologically and/or descriptively adequate. On the other hand, the various approaches show a considerable overlap in the individual relations adopted, thus suggesting a "commOn ground" shared by all approaches. For the aims of our research, rather than committ ing to one or another interpretation of discourse relations, we have abstracted from the various taxonomies three broad classes or types of relations, namely an additive type, a consequential type, and a contrastive type. These three classes are identified on the ground of the basic cognitive operation which is implied in the instantiation of a connection between adjacent segments of discourse. A d d i t i v e relations share the common feature of implying some kind of similarity between the segments they relate. We conceive the notion of similarity in a broad sense, so that an additive relation is supposed to hotd when a) p(x) can be inferred from the assertion of $1 and p(y) can be inferred from the assertion of S2,where x and y belong to a similar class of entities. For example: 1. The French proposal to invoke the right to self-determination of that population having been rejected ($I), also the idea of a military intervention has been abandoned ($2). b) p(X) can be inferred from the assertion of 5'1 and p(x) can be inferred from the assertion of $2, where x is a member or subset of X (as for specification or exemplification). For example:
Longitudinal analysis of performance of estimated glomerular filtration rate as renal function declines in chronic kidney disease.

BACKGROUND Numerous studies have assessed the accuracy of equations estimating glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from serum creatinine in individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in cross-sectional studies. Limited literature exists, however, on the consistency of performance of these equations in longitudinal studies as renal function declines. METHODS Radionucleotide-measured GFR from 155 predialysis patients with stage 3-5 CKD was compared with eGFR derived from four equations [6-variable Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (6-MDRD), 4-variable MDRD (4-MDRD), Cockcroft-Gault (CG) and Cockcroft-Gault equations corrected for body surface area (CGC)] at baseline, 12 and 24 months. Bias (difference between eGFR and measured GFR) was used as a measure of performance. Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML) models were used to identify variables potentially affecting the performance of estimating equations across time. RESULTS Mean measured GFR (+/-SD) at baseline, 12 and 24 months was 25.9 +/- 10.7, 23.1 +/- 10.6 and 20.3 +/- 10.1 mL/min/1.73 m(2), respectively. There was a statistically significant negative association between bias and GFR for all four estimates (range: -0.76 to -0.71, P < 0.001 for all), indicating worsening underestimation and overestimation at higher and lower GFR, respectively. This negative association significantly reduced over the 24 months (P < 0.001); however, this was largely due to persistent underestimation of eGFR from individuals with GFR >50 mL/min/1.73 m(2). For those with a baseline GFR <50 mL/min/1.73 m(2), the change in bias for any of the four equations over 24 months was <or=1.1 mL/min/1.73 m(2), suggesting relatively preserved performance with time. The MDRD equations showed a sustained advantage in estimating renal function that was more evident as GFR declined. CONCLUSION GFR estimates are inexpensive and show an acceptable longitudinal performance for monitoring CKD patients with GFR <50 mL/min/1.73 m(2). Inaccuracies appear more substantial above this level of GFR, and care with interpretation is required.
Sparse Variational Analysis of Large Longitudinal Data Sets

It is increasingly common to be faced with longitudinal or multi-level data sets that have large number of predictors and/or a large sample size. Current methods of fitting and inference for mixed e ffects models tend to perform poorly in such settings. When there are many variables, it is appealing to allow uncertainty in subset selection and to obtain a sparse characterization of the data. Bayesian methods are available to address these goals using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), but MCMC is very computationally expensive and can be infeasible in large p and/or large n problems. As a fast approximate Bayes solution, we recommend a novel approximation to the posterior relying on variational methods. Variational methods are used to approximate the posterior of the parameters in a decomposition of the variance components, with priors chosen to obtain a sparse solution that allows selection of random effects. The method is evaluated through a simulation study, and applied to an epidemiological application.
Multiresolution of the Fourier transform

In this paper, the integral Fourier transform is described as a specific wavelet-like transform with a fully scalable modulated window, but not all possible translations. The transform is defined by sinusoidal waves of half periods. A geometrical locus of frequency-time points for the proposed wavelet-like transform is derived and the function coverage is described and compared with the short-time Fourier transform as well as with the wavelet transform.
Scheduling on a Reconfigurable Processor with Virtual

Reconfigurable computing devices offer substantial improvements in functional density and yield versus traditional microprocessors, yet remain out of general-purpose use due in part to their difficulty of programming and lack of cross-device compatibility. This project presents a reconfigurable architecture which supports automated compilation and cross-device compatibility by virtualizing hardware resources and automating management thereof in operating system services. A study of architectural parameters indicates that this architecture would benefit from small time slices on the order of a millisecond, and from a high availability of configurable memory resources. A dynamic scheduling algorithm is presented whose effectiveness is found to depend heavily on clustering and co-scheduling of virtual compute operators.
Thoughts on weak links and Alexandrian life in Scrum

This paper looks at the Scrum software development process through a lens that emphasizes small worldness, nestedness, and scale-freeness, all characteristic of networks that feature weak links between their modules. Scrum has gained popularity over the past decade as a means of delivering valuable software to its host organization on a regular basis. Since weak links characterize natural and social systems at every scale, practitioners of Scrum should be able to improve their teams' processes by applying lessons learned from studying weak links. When practitioners look for weak links directly, they may find the task daunting and ask the question: "How can I tell whether weak links are strengthening or weakening my team's Scrum process if I can't even find them? " For the answer, this paper looks to Christopher Alexander's characteristics of wholeness, integrity, or life -- strong centers, levels of scale, echoes, alternating repetition, and, in particular, the characteristic called deep interlock and ambiguity -- which may correlate with the presence of weak links.