Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scalable don't-care-based logic optimization and resynthesis

We describe an optimization method for combinational and sequential logic networks, with emphasis on scalability. The proposed resynthesis (a) is capable of substantial logic restructuring, (b) is customizable to solve a variety of optimization tasks, and (c) has reasonable runtime on industrial designs. The approach uses don't-cares computed for a window surrounding a node and can take into account external don't-cares (e.g., unreachable states). It uses a SAT solver for all aspects of Boolean manipulation: computing don't-cares for a node in the window, and deriving a new Boolean function of the node after resubstitution. Experimental results on 6-input LUT networks after a high effort synthesis show substantial reductions in area and delay. When applied to 20 large academic benchmarks, the LUT counts and logic levels are reduced by 45.0% and 12.2%, respectively. The longest runtime for synthesis and mapping is about two minutes. When applied to a set of 14 industrial benchmarks ranging up to 83K 6-LUTs, the LUT counts and logic levels are reduced by 11.8% and 16.5%, respectively. The longest runtime is about 30 minutes.
GENOTYPE AND AGE EFFECTS ON IMMUNITY TRAITS , CORTICOSTERONE AND OXIDATIVE STATUS IN GROWING RABBITS

To investigate the effects of genotype and age on native immunity, corticosterone and oxidative status 60 weaned rabbits were used; 30 Native Middle-Egypt rabbits (NMER) and 30 New Zealand White (NZW). Blood samples were collected and analyzed from each rabbit at 45, 60, and 75 d of age. Native immunity were included count and differential count of leukocyte, Serum Bactericidal Activity –SBA, Hemolytic complement Assay–HCA, lysozyme). Oxidative status (Reactive Oxygen Substances–ROS and total Antioxidant Capacity of plasma, TAC) were estimated in plasma. Genotype was an important source of variation (p< 0.01) for leukocytes where NMER was higher than NZW. Effect of age was not significant in Leukocytes. Genotype and age had significant (p<0.05) effect in both of Netruphile and Lymphocyte. Netruphile was increased while lymphocyte decreased at 45 d (after 10 d from weaning). Corticosterone levels at 45 days were higher than at others ages in both breeds. Breed significantly influenced Lysozyme and SBA in native immunity traits. NMER rabbits were characterized by a higher lysozyme, an increased SBA and complement when compared to NZW rabbits at different age. Lysozyme and HCA trends were higher at 45d than at 60 d, whereas the SBA increased with age. Reduced plasma levels of ROS in NMER rabbits at 60 and 75 days of age compared to NZW. TAC and ROS were significantly (p<0.05) affected by age while breed had no significant effect It can be concluded that NMER rabbits were characterized by of native immunity traits (lysozyme, SBA and complement) when compared to NZW rabbits at different ages.
JG2A: A Grid-enabled object-oriented framework for developing genetic algorithms

Java Genetic Algorithm (JGA) is a flexible object-oriented framework for rapid prototyping of evolutionary algorithms. Even though JGA has proven to be flexible and efficient in practice, parallelization opens new avenues to the framework. Java Grid-enabled Genetic Algorithm (JG2A) is a new generation of JGA that exploits parallelism in genetic algorithms in two ways: first, it allows the execution in parallel of a large set of instances (instances parallelization); and second, it provides parallelization of the population evaluation (population evaluation parallelization). We illustrate instances parallelization in different parameter tuning experiments of vehicle routing and route design problems. The population evaluation parallelization is particularly useful for hard black-box optimization problems where the fitness function evaluation embeds a discrete-event or finite-element analysis simulation. JG2A can be deployed in a heterogeneous computational environment enabled by a grid based on Globus and Condor acting as the local resource manager.
High K+ and IGF‐1 protect cerebellar granule neurons via distinct signaling pathways

In culture, cerebellar granule neurons die of apoptosis in serum‐free media containing a physiologic level of K+ but survive in a depolarizing concentration of K+ or when insulin‐like growth factor 1 (IGF‐1) is added. Both Akt/PKB activation and caspase‐3 inhibition were implicated as the underlying neuroprotective mechanisms. The duration of high K+, however, induced survival effects that outlasted its transient activation of Akt, and granule neurons derived from caspase‐3 knockout mice died to the same extent as did those from wild‐type mice, suggesting that additional mechanisms are involved. To delineate these survival mechanisms, we compared the activities of two major survival pathways after high K+‐induced depolarization or IGF‐1 stimulation. Although IGF‐1 promoted neuronal survival by activating its tyrosine kinase receptor, high K+ depolarization provided the same effect by increasing the Ca2+ influx through the L Ca2+ channel. Moreover, high K+‐induced depolarization resulted in sustained activation of MAP kinase, whereas IGF‐1 activated Akt in 4 hr. Inhibition of MEK (MAP kinase kinase) by either PD98059 or UO126 abolished the protective effect of high K+‐induced depolarization, but not that of IGF‐1, suggesting that activation of the MAP kinase pathway is necessary for high K+ neuroprotective effects. We demonstrated also that high K+‐induced depolarization, but not IGF‐1, increased phosphorylation of cAMP‐response element‐binding protein (CREB) and protein synthesis, both of which can be blocked by UO126. Overall, our findings suggested that high K+‐induced depolarization, unlike IGF‐1, promoted neuronal survival via activating MAP kinase, possibly by increasing CREB‐dependent transcriptional activation of specific proteins that promote neuronal survival. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Cyclic Process Model for Monitoring Mobile Cyber-Physical Systems

Basic approaches of mobile cyber-physical systems (CPS) such like cars, trains, aeroplanes or spaceships are parts of our daily life. Mobile CPSs are embedded into a physical environment which is usually harsh and uncertain. Monitoring mobile CPSs is essential to ensure reliability and to avoid damage. Monitoring mobile CPSs presupposes knowledge about the CPS, the physical environment and the system behaviour. Such knowledge needs to be discovered continuously because of continuous changes like wear and tear. Our contribution is the definition of an abstract process cycle for monitoring mobile CPSs. We call this abstract process cycle the Knowledge Discovery Cycle (KDC). Our KDC is based on common characteristics of mobile CPSs and key challenges for monitoring mobile CPSs. We particularly discuss common characteristics and key challenges by means of the German Inter City Express and the International Space Station. Based on this, we examine five overall considerations for monitoring mobile CPSs. Further on, we identify processing steps for our KDC and we associate existing concepts and technologies with the identified processing steps. This involves knowledge discovery in databases, knowledge discovery from data streams and complex event processing.
A pilot study comparing pattern of damage sustained among instruments from different surgical units in a tertiary care centre in Nepal – reappraising the role of instrument reprocessing in retaining their value

Background: The quality of instruments plays a pivotal role in governing safe operating room culture. The reprocessing system followed in the institution determines their durability thereby ensuring patient safety as well as minimizing health spending. Rigorous reprocessing in a centralized instrument reprocessing department by well trained staff following formulated guidelines helps to achieve the target of “safe surgery saves lives” as formulated by the World Health Organization. Methods: We sought to determine the patterns of wear and tear sustained among sets of surgical equipment from two surgical units that had been sent to the repair department within a year of their purchase. Analysis of similar changes in the joints of the instrument, as well as pattern of fractures sustained was performed. Results: All patterns of wear and tear were common in both the general surgical arm and neurosurgical counterpart, with the exception of fractures and mal-alignments. Similar study was performed examining changes in the joints. Stains were the most commonly observed change pattern in both sets of instruments. Fractures were most frequent in the working ends in both sets of instruments. Conclusion: There is an alarming incidence of wear and tear patterns in the instruments used in the surgical units, even within the first year of their use. This supports the strict implementation of reprocessing guidelines by well trained workers and their quality assessments via audit checks. The quality of the purchased instruments also plays a pivotal role.
Hierarchical Probabilistic Segmentation of Discrete Events

Segmentation, the task of splitting a long sequence of discrete symbols into chunks, can provide important information about the nature of the sequence that is understandable to humans. Algorithms for segmenting mostly belong to the supervised learning family, where a labeled corpus is available to the algorithm in the learning phase. We are interested, however, in the unsupervised scenario, where the algorithm never sees examples of successful segmentation, but still needs to discover meaningful segments. In this paper we present an unsupervised learning algorithm for segmenting sequences of symbols or categorical events. Our algorithm, Hierarchical Multigram, hierarchically builds a lexicon of segments and computes a maximum likelihood segmentation given the current lexicon. Thus, our algorithm is most appropriate to hierarchical sequences, where smaller segments are grouped into larger segments. Our probabilistic approach also allows us to suggest conditional entropy as a measurement of the quality of a segmentation in the absence of labeled data. We compare our algorithm to two previous approaches from the unsupervised segmentation literature, showing it to provide superior segmentation over a number of benchmarks. We also compare our algorithm to previous approaches over a segmentation of the unlabeled interactions of a web service and its client.
Wireless sensors in network based collaborative environments

Use of telecollaboration (TC) systems based on sensor networks in education is an emerging field of research. It is feasible to connect many small wireless micro-sensors ("smart dust"), PDAs and cellular phones into a network that extends a TC education system. It is expected that those sensors collect and fuse various data and transmit the information through the network for enhanced TC educational outcomes. However, the traditional challenges remain the same. This includes the ability of managing resources such as: power, bandwidth, distances, performance of the sensors and related hardware. At the heart of the sensor network paradigm are the human factors. We realize that the concept of the human research is native to such emerging technologies as wireless sensor networks, sensor enabling facilities, ubiquitous computing devices and all IP next generation networks that are challenging the rationale of traditional information fusion systems. The technology has reached a level of maturity at which it is reasonable to discover sensors based on the context awareness, pertinence, query for appropriate data, and fuse it using applicable fusion rules, computing and communication infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce innovative concepts for support of TC solutions, identify design, development methodologies as well as challenges for TC systems.
Commentary: gene-environment interactions and smoking-related cancers.

Spain. Registro de Cáncer de Navarra, Instituto de Salud Pública,Gobierno de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Subdirección de Salud Pública de Gipuzkoa, Gobierno Vasco, San Sebastian, Spain. MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, Cambridge, UK. Cancer Research UK, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. Centre for Food and Health, National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Bilthoven, The Netherlands. Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, Department of Epidemiology, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Athens, Athens, Greece. Division of Clinical Epidemiology, German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg, Germany. Department of Epidemiology, Deutsches Institut für Ernährungsforschung, Potsdam-Rehbrücke, Germany. Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, University of Umeå, Umeå, Sweden. Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. The Danish Cancer Society, Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Copenhagen, Denmark. Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway.
Regulation of glycogenolysis in human muscle in response to epinephrine infusion.

The regulation of glycogenolysis in human muscle during epinephrine infusion has been investigated. The content of cAMP in resting muscle was 2.7 +/- 0.7 (SD) mumol . kg dry muscle-1 and increased threefold during the first 5 min of infusion. Total glycogen phosphorylase and glycogen synthase activities were unchanged during the infusion. The proportion of phosphorylase in the a form in the basal state was estimated to be at least 22.5% and during infusion 80-90%. During infusion, synthase I activity decreased. The muscle glycogen content was 340 mmol . kg dry wt-1 and decreased during the first 2 min of infusion at a rate of 11.0 mmol glycosyl units . kg dry wt-1 . min-1. Prolonged infusion resulted in a much lower glycogenolytic rate, even though most of the phosphorylase was still in the a form. Accumulation of hexose monophosphates and lactate followed the changes in glycogen. It was concluded that despite the almost total transformation of phosphorylase to the a form, the in vivo activity was maintained at a low level. It is suggested that this may be due to a low concentration of inorganic phosphate at the active site of the enzyme.
Proactive and reactive collaboration schemes for multi-domain networks monitoring

The monitoring of the quality of service in a multi-domain network supervises the multi-domain service performance. A multi-domain service is a service that crosses several domains which can be managed by different providers. Since each domain can be managed with its own policies and may require confidentiality of its topology and its monitoring processes, we propose that the monitoring architecture has to be configurable. In this paper, we propose two collaboration schemes that are based on the reactive and the proactive modes. Both of collaboration schemes allow the multi-domain monitoring architecture to select the measurement points that will participate in the multi-domain monitoring and to configure the selected measurement points. In this paper, we present our proposed collaboration schemes and then we evaluate their performance through extensive simulations using Network Simulator (NS-2).
On the timing synchronization methods for optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OOFDM) systems: Comparisons and improvement

We show numerical simulation results of three different timing synchronization methods in OOFDM system using Intensity-Modulation and Direct-Detection (IMDD) in Multi-Mode Fiber (MMF) channel and do comparative study of the three algorithms. Based on Park's algorithm, we present a modification to it that gets a very sharp timing metric curve.
Social Justice, Policy and Parents’ Understanding of their Voice in School Governing Bodies in South Africa

Despite the powers that parents are endowed with regarding governance of schools in South Africa, they are not yet given sufficient room and space to deliberate on issues of school governance; instead they are still excluded by some teaching staff who deny them (explicitly or implicitly) from taking part in crucial decisions affecting education of their children. There are still issues excluding parents from participation in school governing bodies, namely: the lack of clear demarcation between the roles of the teaching staff and those of the school governing body (SGB), lack of time, lack of confidence from some parents, transport problems which result in non‐attendance of SGB meetings by some parents, poor communication of information, lack of training which results in lack of knowledge of the Act and roles and responsibilities, the language barrier, and the high turnover rate of governors as parents have to leave the SGB as soon as his/her child leaves the school. The findings of this research partly concur with Karlsson, who also found that SGBs perpetuate rather than prevent the apartheid‐era inequalities of race, gender and social class. Despite these discrepancies, the study found that SGBs operate according to the general intentions of the South African Schools Act 84 of 1996 and also help spread democracy in the school and to the wider society of South Africa.
Clinical assessment of selenium status of livestock.

Assessment of the selenium status of livestock is an important aspect of production medicine, but variations in reported values between laboratories and between methods may be > 30%. Reliable interpretations require considerable experience with an assay and an extensive database from field and research case samples of a variety of species. The Michigan State University Animal Health Diagnostic Laboratory (MSU-ADHL) has offered Se analyses by acid-digestion and fluorometric detection since 1982. This laboratory expects serum Se values (nanograms per milliliter) of livestock to increase gradually with age from starting ranges for neonates of 50 to 80 for calves and sheep and 70 to 90 for foals and pigs. Expected or "normal" values for the adults are in the ranges of 70 to 100 for cattle, 120 to 150 for sheep, 130 to 160 for horses, and 180 to 220 for swine. Normal liver Se concentrations are considered to range between 1.2 and 2.0 micrograms/g on a dry weight basis, regardless of the species or age. Based on samples submitted to MSU-AHDL between September 1990 and August 1991, contemporary feeding practices in the Michigan area resulted in mean serum Se values (nanograms per milliliter) of 75 +/- 19 for adult Holsteins, 170 +/- 27 for adult swine (mixed breeds), and 137 +/- 30 for adult race horses. Within that period of time, two field cases of Se toxicity were diagnosed. One involved feeder pigs with a recorded high serum Se value of 1,525 ng/mL due to a commercial premix manufacturing error. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Efficacy of Adalimumab in Korean Patients with Crohn’s Disease

Background/Aims Adalimumab is effective for both remission induction and the maintenance of Crohn’s disease (CD) in Western countries. We evaluated the efficacy of adalim-umab in the conventional step-up treatment approach for CD in Korea. Methods We retrospectively reviewed 62 patients with CD who were treated with adalimumab. Their Crohn’s disease activity index (CDAI) was measured at weeks 4, 8, and 52. Clinical remission was defined as a CDAI score <150. Induction and maintenance outcomes were analyzed. Results Forty-one patients (66.1%) achieved a reduction of 70 CDAI points at week 8. Among them, 28 (45.2%) achieved clinical remission at week 8, 20 (32.3%) maintained remission at week 52. The absence of prior anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF) therapy and Montreal classification L1 at baseline predicted clinical remission at week 8 in the multivariate logistic regression analysis. In the Cox proportional hazards model, the hazard ratio for the secondary loss of response during maintenance therapy after clinical remission induction was significantly higher in patients who showed initial mild CDAI severity or Montreal classification A3. Conclusions In our study, anti-TNF therapy-naive and Montreal classification L1 were associated with adalimumab efficacy as induction therapy in CD. Further studies are warranted to determine the prognostic factors for the long-term response after adalimumab therapy.
TopX Efficient and Versatile Top-k Query Processing for Semistructured Data

Recent IR extensions to XML query languages such as Xpath 1.0 Full-Text or the NEXI query language of the INEX benchmark series reflect the emerging interest in IR-style ranked retrieval over semistructured data. TopX is a top-k retrieval engine for text and semistructured data. It terminates query execution as soon as it can safely determine the k top-ranked result elements according to a monotonic score aggregation function with respect to a multidimensional query. It efficiently supports vague search on both contentand structure-oriented query conditions for dynamic query relaxation with controllable influence on the result ranking. The main contributions of this paper unfold into four main points: 1) fully implemented models and algorithms for ranked XML retrieval with XPath Full-Text functionality, 2) efficient and effective top-k query processing for semistructured data, 3) support for integrating thesauri and ontologies with statistically quantified relationships among concepts, leveraged for word-sense disambiguation and query expansion, and 4) a comprehensive description of the TopX system, with performance experiments on large-scale corpora like TREC Terabyte and INEX Wikipedia.
Layered LDPC Decoding Over $GF(q)$ for Magnetic Recording Channel

This paper proposes a layered decoding algorithm for the low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over GF(q). The layered decoding can be applied to parity-check matrices that are structured in layers, such as quasi-cyclic (QC) parity-check matrices. When simulated over a magnetic recording channel, the layered decoder outperforms the conventional decoder in the number of inner iterations and in the block error rate.
A novel sliding mode controller for DC-DC boost converters under input/load variations

In this paper a simple sliding mode controller based on the averaging state space model is proposed for a DC-DC boost converter. It is demonstrated to be easily implemented and has time-variant sliding coefficients. The proposed controller can effectively regulate the output voltage by controlling the switch states (through the dynamic duty cycles) even when the input voltage, load or output command varies. Furthermore the controller is independent of the inductor current and the load, although the load value is needed when designing the sliding coefficients. The constant switching frequency is maintained thus simplifying the design procedure, enhancing the regulation properties and benefiting the filter design. The controller has good dynamic response, overshoot damping and robustness. Comparative simulations are carried in MATLAB/Simulink between the proposed approach and a widely used PID controller to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.
Responding to membership in a disadvantaged group : from acceptance to collective protest

The question addressed is, when do disadvantaged-group members accept their situation, take individual action, or attempt to instigate collective action? Ss attempted to move from a low-status group into an advantaged, high-status group and were asked to respond to their subsequent rejec­ tion. Ss who believed that the high-status group was open to members of their group endorsed acceptance and individual actions. When access to the high-status group was restricted, even to the point of being almost closed (tokenism), Ss still preferred individual action. Disruptive forms of collective action were only favored by Ss who were told that the high-status group was completely closed to members oftheirgroup. Ss who believed they were near togainingentry into the high-sta­ tus group favored individual protest, while Ss distant from entry were more likely to accept their position. The theoretical and societal implications ofthese findings are discussed.