Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
IMR: High-Performance Low-Cost Multi-Ring NoCs

A ring topology is a common solution of network-on-chip (NoC) in industry, but is frequently criticized to have poor scalability. In this paper, we present a novel type of multi-ring NoC called isolated multi-ring (IMR), which can even support chip multiprocessors (CMPs) with 1,024 cores. In IMR, any pair of cores are connected via at least one isolated ring, so that each packet can reach the destination without transferring from one ring to another. Therefore, IMR no longer needs expensive routers as mesh, which not only enhances the network performance but also reduces hardware overheads. We utilize simulated evolution to design optimized IMR topologies. We compare these IMR topologies against nine representative NoCs (e.g., traditional mesh, multi mesh, low-cost mesh, Express-virtual-channels mesh (EVC), torus ring, and hierarchical ring). We observe from experiments that IMR significantly outperforms its competitors in both saturation throughput and latency across all scenarios considered. For example, in a 16 × 16 CMP, IMR improves the saturation throughput of a state-of-the-art mesh (EVC) by 265.29 percent on average, and reduces the average packet latency on SPLASH-2 application traces by 71.58 percent, while consuming 5.08 percent less area and 9.76 percent less power. In a 32 × 32 CMP, IMR averagely improves the saturation throughput of EVC by 191.58 percent, and averagely reduces the packet latency on SPLASH-2 application traces by 23.09 percent, while consuming 2.86 percent less area and 10.81 percent less power.
Stigmatization and Self-Esteem of Persons in Recovery From Mental Illness: the Role of Peer Support

Background: Persons with mental health problems often experience stigmatization, which can have detrimental consequences for their objective and subjective quality of life. Previous research seeking for elements buffering this negative association focused on coping strategies and revealed that none of the most often used strategies is successful. Aims: This article studies whether peer support among clients can moderate this negative link, and to what extent. Following the buffering hypothesis on stress and social support, it was expected that the association between stigmatization and self-esteem would be less among persons experiencing greater peer support. Methods: This research problem was studied by means of ordinary least squares regression analysis using quantitative data from structured questionnaires completed by 595 clients of rehabilitation centres. Results and Conclusions: The results confirm that stigmatization is negatively related to self-esteem, while peer support is positively linked with it. Furthermore, they show that peer support moderates the negative association between stigmatization and self-esteem, but not in the expected way. These findings suggest that peer support can only have positive outcomes among clients with few stigma experiences, and that stigmatization itself could impede the formation and beneficial consequences of constructive peer relationships among persons receiving professional mental healthcare.
Translation and cross-cultural adaptation into Brazilian Portuguese of the Measure of Parental Style (MOPS)--a self-reported scale--according to the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) recommendations.

OBJECTIVE To describe the translation and adaptation methodology for the Measure of Parental Style, a self-report instrument developed originally in English, following the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research guidelines, comparing this to other methodologies used for the same purposes. METHOD Translation and Cultural Adaptation group International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research guidelines were followed (preparation, first forward translation, reconciliation, back translation, revision of back translation, harmonization, cognitive debriefing, revision of debriefing results, syntax and orthographic revision, final report). CONCLUSION A careful and qualified cross-cultural translation and adaptation of an instrument contribute for measuring what it is designed to measure across cultures. Presenting this process, besides its final product, provides the opportunity that this experience could be replicated for adaptation of other instruments.
Providing best-effort services in dataspace systems

Nowadays many data sharing applications need to manage a dataspace [68], which contains a number of heterogeneous data sources and partially unstructured data. Such scenarios include large enterprises, collaborative scientific projects, digital libraries, personal information, and the Web. Understanding the relationships between the data sources requires specifying schema mappings, such as one stating that full-name in one data source corresponds to the concatenation of first-name and last-name in another data source. However, the data sources in a dataspace are only loosely coupled, so we may not have schema mappings specified up front. This dissertation studies how to provide best-effort search, querying and browsing services in a dataspace system, even when precise schema mappings are not present. To provide useful services over all data in a dataspace, we need to resolve heterogeneity in the data. Heterogeneity exists at three levels in a dataspace. At the instance level, the same real-world entity can be referred to using different values; for example, a person can be referred to as "Mike" in some data sources and as "Michael" in others. At the schema level, the same domain can be described using different schemas; for example, a person can be described by his first-name and last-name in one data source and by his full-name and other-name in another data source. At the query level, user queries can be composed according to a schema different from the source schema, or even in a language that is not supported by the data model of the source data; for example, a user may compose a SQL query whereas some data sources are unstructured. In this dissertation we describe solutions for resolving heterogeneity in a dataspace. To resolve heterogeneity at the instance level, we describe an algorithm that reconcile references that refer to the same real-world entity. Our algorithm can be applied to references that belong to multiple classes where rich associations between the references exist. To resolve heterogeneity at the schema level, we propose the concept of probabilistic schema mapping, with which we can return approximate answers even when precise mappings do not exist. We study the complexity of query answering with respect to probabilistic mappings. To resolve heterogeneity at the query level, we design an index over heterogeneous data in a dataspace. Our index extends inverted lists to capture both text and structure of the data to facilitate efficient answering of queries that combine keywords and structure. In addition, we design an algorithm that answers structured queries on unstructured data, such that we can provide seamless search on both structured and unstructured data. Finally, we have grounded all our technical solutions to a particular system, the SEMEX Personal Information Management System. S EMEX provides a logical view of one's personal information, such that it supports associative browsing and provides seamless search and querying over one's personal data.
The Political Partisanship of American Business: A Study of Corporate Political Action Committees

This study uses data on the contributions of corporate political action committees to evaluate six popular theories of business political partisanship. Two theories are supported by the data: the "Yankee-Cowboy" theory of regional political differences among U.S. corporations and the regulatory environment theory, which views the differential relationship to government regulation as a primary determinant of corporate political behavior. No support is found for four other theories of business political partisanship: the core-periphery theory, the inner-circle theory, the managerialist theory, and the domestic-multinational theory. The four disconfirmed theories are all variants of a perspective known as the theory of "corporate liberalism, " which hypothesizes a tendency toward greater liberalism on the part of the more dominant or central corporations in American society.
Towards quantitative comparison of motion estimation algorithms

Motion estimation is a common component of machine vision systems. Given the number of motion estimation algorithms available, selection of an appropriate algorithm is a difficult process. A quantitative measurement of the performance of motion estimation algorithms on real unlabelled data allows for more realistic comparison of motion estimation algorithms than the current situation. At present the most common measure of a motion estimation algorithm involves comparing a measured to a known motion field. Szeliski suggested treating motion estimation as a registration process. The motion between two successive images is computed and used to warp one of the images onto the other. The registration error is then used as a quantitative measure of the motion estimation algorithm. An extension to the Szeliski metric is examined. Examples will be shown where algorithms are selected and the tunable parameters are optimised for some test sequences.
The Distal Hinge of the Reactive Site Loop and Its Proximity

The serpin plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 (PAI-1) plays a regulatory role in various physiological processes (e.g. fibrinolysis and pericellular proteolysis) and forms a potential target for therapeutic interventions. In this study we identified the epitopes of three PAI-1 inhibitory monoclonal antibodies (MA-44E4, MA-42A2F6, and MA-56A7C10). Differential cross-reactivities of these monoclonals with PAI-1 from different species and sequence alignments between these PAI-1s, combined with the three-dimensional structure, revealed several charged residues as possible candidates to contribute to the respective epitopes. The production, characterization, and subsequent evaluation of a variety of alanine mutants using surface plasmon resonance revealed that the residues His185, Arg186, and Arg187 formed the major sites of interaction for MA-44E4. In contrast, the epitopes of MA-42A2F6 and MA-56A7C10 were found to be conformational. The epitope of MA-42A2F6 comprises residues Lys243 and Glu350, whereas the epitope of MA-56A7C10 comprises residues Glu242, Lys243, Glu244, Glu350, Asp355, and Arg356. The participation of Glu350, Asp355, and Arg356 provides a molecular explanation for the differential exposure of this epitope in the different conformations of PAI-1 and for the effect of these antibodies on the kinetics of the formation of the initial PAI-1-proteinase complexes. The localization of the epitopes of MA-44E4, MA42A2F6, and MA-56A7C10 elucidates two previously unidentified molecular mechanisms to modulate PAI-1 activity and opens new perspectives for the rational development of PAI-1 neutralizing compounds.
Controllably mobile infrastructure for low energy embedded networks

We discuss the use of mobility to enhance network performance for a certain class of applications in sensor networks. A major performance bottleneck in sensor networks is energy since it is impractical to replace the batteries in embedded sensor nodes post-deployment. A significant portion of the energy expenditure is attributed to communications and, in particular, the nodes close to the sensor network gateways used for data collection typically suffer a large overhead as these nodes must relay data from the remaining network. Even with compression and in-network processing to reduce the amount of communicated data, all the processed data must still traverse these nodes to reach the gateway. We discuss a network infrastructure based on the use of controllably mobile elements to reduce the communication energy consumption at the energy constrained nodes and, thus, increase useful network lifetime. In addition, our approach yields advantages in delay-tolerant networks and sparsely deployed networks. We first show how our approach helps reduce energy consumption at battery constrained nodes. Second, we describe our system prototype, which utilizes our proposed approach to improve the energy performance. As part of the prototyping effort, we experienced several interesting design choices and trade-offs that affect system capabilities and performance. We describe many of these design challenges and discuss the algorithms developed for addressing these. In particular, we focus on network protocols and motion control strategies. Our methods are tested using a practical system and do not assume idealistic radio range models or operation in unobstructed environments
Roles of recombination in trinucleotide repeat instability in E.coli

Expansion beyond a threshold length in specific trinucleotide repeat (TR) tracts have been shown to cause at least 15 inherited human neurological disorders. The mechanism of expansion of TR tract length is unknown, but is thought to relate to the unusual ability of (CAG/CTG) and (CCG/CGG) TR tracts to fold into stable secondary structures such as pseudo-hairpins. Hairpin structures within long palindromic sequences of DNA have previously been shown in E. coli to be sites of genetic instability mediated by hairpin cleavage and subsequent recombinational repair. TR tracts have also been shown to stall DNA replication forks in vivo, and recombination is known to be important in the re-initiation of stalled and broken replication forks. TRs have the ability to mis-anneal at any point along the length of the complementary strand tract, offering potential for changes in tract length during replication or homologous recombination. Therefore, the aim of the work presented in this thesis was to investigate the contribution of recombination to the instability of TR tracts earned in high copy number plasmids in E. coli. Plasmid dimerisation was used as an assay for crossover production during recombination. Recent work has suggested biased Holliday junction resolution for different recombination substrates. In this way, the increased recovery of dimeric CTG43 plasmid compared to CAG 4 3 and pUC 18 control in recF cells was interpreted as the production of long ss overhangs in (CTG)43 tracts, suggested to result from hairpin cleavage in ssDNA resulting from incomplete Okazaki fragment synthesis. The persistence of these and other recombination substrates was investigated using sfiA-lac and 2-gal assays. Both assays demonstrated that the SOS response was not de-repressed by the presence of (CAG/CTG)43, or (CCG/CGG)24 tracts in E. coli. However, differences in DNA maintenance between TR tract and standard plasmid DNA were detected after 12 day incubations following co-transformation with copies of pUC18 and pUC18 carrying TR tracts. Plasmids carrying short TR tracts of (CCGICGG)24, (CAGICTG)25, and (CAG/CTG)28 displayed a surprising propensity to out-compete standard pUCI8, interpreted as an ability of these tracts to initiate replication. However, plasmids carrying longer (CAGICTG)43 tracts displayed stark losses to standard pUC18, perhaps due to replication inhibition or elevated
On Homotopic Harmonic Maps

Let M, M′ be C∞ Riemann manifolds such that (1.0) M is compact; (1.1) M′ is complete and its sectional curvatures are non-positive. In terms of local coordinates x = (x 1, … , xn ) on M and y = (y 1, … , ym ) on M′, let the respective Riemann elements of arc-length be and Γ i jk , Γ′ α βγ be the corresponding Christoffel symbols. When there is no danger of confusion, x (or y) will represent a point of M (or M′) or its coordinates in some local coordinate system.
Analysis of load sharing techniques in enterprise LTE femtocells

In cellular networks, traffic demand is unevenly distributed both in time and space. This paper investigates the problem of re-distributing traffic demand between LTE femtocells in an enterprise scenario. A performance comparison of several traffic sharing techniques is carried out based on simulations. For this purpose, an efficient dynamic system-level LTE simulator is built. Results show that the combination of directed retry and load sharing by tuning handover margins and transmit power is an effective means to solve localized congestion problems.
Spectral Risk Measures: Properties and Limitations

Spectral risk measures (SRMs) are risk measures that take account of user risk-aversion, but to date there has been little guidance on the choice of utility function underlying them. This paper addresses this issue by examining alternative approaches based on exponential and power utility functions. A number of problems are identified with both types of spectral risk measure. The general lesson is that users of spectral risk measures must be careful to select utility functions that fit the features of the particular problems they are dealing with, and should be especially careful when using power SRMs.
An Opportunistic Batch Bundle Authentication Scheme for Energy Constrained DTNs

Bundle Authentication is a critical security service in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) that ensures authenticity and integrity of bundles during multi-hop transmissions. Public key signatures, which have been suggested in existing bundle security protocol specification, achieve bundle authentication at the cost of an increased computational, transmission overhead and a higher energy consumption, which is not desirable for energy-constrained DTNs. On the other hand, the unique ``store-carry-and-forward'' transmission characteristic of DTNs implies that bundles from distinct/common senders can be buffered opportunistically at some common intermediate nodes. This ``buffering'' characteristic distinguishes DTN from any other traditional wireless networks, for which an intermediate cache is not supported. To exploit such a buffering characteristic, in this paper, we propose an Opportunistic Batch Bundle Authentication Scheme (OBBA) to achieve efficient bundle authentication. The proposed scheme adopts batch verification techniques, allowing a computational overhead to be bounded by the number of opportunistic contacts instead of the number of messages. Furthermore, we introduce a novel concept of a fragment authentication tree to minimize communication cost by choosing an optimal tree height. Finally, we implement OBBA in a specific DTN scenario setting: pocket-switched networks on campus. The simulation results in terms of computation time, transmission overhead and power consumption are given to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed schemes.
Synchronization of Complex Networks With Impulsive Control and Disconnected Topology

Synchronization of complex networks is an important issue in the study of complex networks. Many existing works reveal that complex networks can reach synchronization under the condition of connected topology; however, by introducing the concept of joint connectivity and sequential connectivity, this brief shows us that complex networks can synchronize even if the topology is not connected at any time instant. Strict technical analysis demonstrates the feasibility of this brief.
An implementation architecture for aspect-oriented component engineering

Aspect-oriented component engineering (AOCE) is a new technique for engineering software components, using a concept of provided and required systemic aspects of a component’s nonfunctional and functional characteristics to support component composition and interaction. These aspects include component user interfaces, collaborative work support, distribution and persistency, security, data management, processing, component inter-relationship and configuration characteristics. We describe support for AOCE in the JViews software architecture via the use of aspects, aspect details and detail properties. We describe implementation of this aspect information using the Java language, including the use of AspectDetail classes to augment JavaBeans, with different specialisations supporting decoupled component aspect querying and access to component services in a very de-coupled manner.
Effect of bile acid sequestrants on glycaemic control: protocol for a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Introduction In addition to the lipid-lowering effect of bile acid sequestrants (BASs), they also lower blood glucose and, therefore, could be beneficial in the treatment of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Three oral BASs are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of hypercholesterolaemia: colestipol, cholestyramine and colesevelam. The BAS colestimide/colestilan is used in Japan. Colesevelam was recently approved by the FDA for the treatment of T2DM. We plan to provide a systematic review with meta-analysis of the glucose-lowering effect of BASs with the aim to evaluate their potential as glucose-lowering agents in patients with T2DM. Methods and analysis In accordance with the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses statement, a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials of BASs (vs placebo, oral antidiabetes drugs or insulin), reporting measures of glycaemic control in adult patients with T2DM, will be performed. Change in glycated haemoglobin constitutes the primary endpoint, and secondary endpoints include changes in fasting plasma glucose, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol, triglycerides, body weight and body mass index and adverse events. Electronic searches will be performed in The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE and EMBASE, along with manual searches in the reference lists of relevant papers. The analyses will be performed based on individual patient data and summarised data. The primary meta-analysis will be performed using random effects models owing to expected intertrial heterogeneity. Dichotomous data will be analysed using risk difference and continuous data using weighted mean differences, both with 95% CIs. Ethics and dissemination The study will evaluate the potential of BASs as glucose-lowering agents and possibly contribute to the clinical management of patients with T2DM. Results The study will be disseminated by peer-review publication and conference presentation. Protocol registration PROSPERO CRD42012002552.
miR-10a restores human mesenchymal stem cell differentiation by repressing KLF4

miRNAs have recently been shown to play a significant role in human aging. However, data demonstrating the effects of aging‐related miRNAs in human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) are limited. We observed that hMSC differentiation decreased with aging. We also identified that miR‐10a expression was significantly decreased with age by comparing the miRNA expression of hMSCs derived from young and aged individuals. Therefore, we hypothesized that the downregulation of miR‐10a may be associated with the decreased differentiation capability of hMSCs from aged individuals. Lentiviral constructs were used to up‐ or downregulate miR‐10a in young and old hMSCs. Upregulation of miR‐10a resulted in increased differentiation to adipogenic, osteogenic, and chondrogenic lineages and in reduced cell senescence. Conversely, downregulation of miR‐10a resulted in decreased cell differentiation and increased cell senescence. A chimeric luciferase reporter system was generated, tagged with the full‐length 3′‐UTR region of KLF4 harboring the seed‐matched sequence with or without four nucleotide mutations. These constructs were cotransfected with the miR‐10a mimic into cells. The luciferase activity was significantly repressed by the miR‐10a mimic, proving the direct binding of miR‐10a to the 3′‐UTR of KLF4. Direct suppression of KLF4 in aged hMSCs increased cell differentiation and decreased cell senescence. In conclusion, miR‐10a restores the differentiation capability of aged hMSCs through repression of KLF4. Aging‐related miRNAs may have broad applications in the restoration of cell dysfunction caused by aging. J. Cell. Physiol. 228: 2324–2336, 2013. © The Authors. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.