Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Joint Carrier Phase Estimation and Turbo Decoding Using Bit Carrier Phase APP Decoder

In this paper, we present an algorithm for joint carrier phase estimation and turbo decoding for the case of rapidly varying carrier phase during the transmitted block. The proposed algorithm shows improved performance over previously proposed communication schemes, both coherent and noncoherent, for channels with additive white Gaussian noise and high carrier phase noise. The novel algorithm utilizes a modified "two dimensional" bit carrier phase a posteriori probability (BCAPP) decoder containing additional states representing the received carrier phase. The BCAPP decoder calculates two extrinsic metrics: one representing the bit soft value and the other representing the received carrier phase probability density function approximation. A modified structure of the turbo code iterations is suggested, implementing separate propagation of the two metrics between the BCAPP decoders. One additional attractive property of the suggested algorithm is its robustness against phase noise model mismatch.
Wearable embroidered muscle activity sensing device for the human upper leg

Within the last decade, running has become one of the most popular physical activities in the world. Although the benefits of running are numerous, there is a risk of Running Related Injuries (RRIs) of the lower extremities. Electromyography (EMG) techniques have previously been used to study causes of RRIs, but the complexity of this technology limits its use to a laboratory setting. As running is primarily an outdoors activity, this lack of technology acts as a barrier to the study of RRIs in natural environments. This study presents a minimally invasive wearable muscle sensing device consisting of jogging leggings with embroidered surface EMG (sEMG) electrodes capable of recording muscle activity data of the quadriceps group. To test the use of the device, a proof of concept study consisting of N = 2 runners performing a set of 5 km running trials is presented in which the effect of running surfaces on muscle fatigue, a potential cause of RRIs, is evaluated. Results show that muscle fatigue can be analysed from the sEMG data obtained through the wearable device, and that running on soft surfaces (such as sand) may increase the likelihood of suffering from RRIs.
FOCUS ARTICLE: The Foundations of Assessment

This article presents major messages from the National Research Council report, Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment (2001). The committee issuing this report was charged with synthesizing advances in the cognitive sciences and measurement, and exploring their implications for improving educational assessment. The article opens with a vision for the future of educational assessment that represents a significant departure from the types of assessments typically available today, and from the ways in which such assessments are most commonly used. This vision is driven by an interpretation of what is both necessary and possible for educational assessment to positively impact student achievement. The argument is made that realizing this vision requires a fundamental rethinking of the foundations and principles guiding assessment design and use. These foundations and principles and their implications are then summarized in the remainder of the article. The argument is made that every assessment, regardless of its purpose, rests on three pillars: (1) a model of how students represent knowledge and develop competence in the subject domain, (2) tasks or situations that allow one to observe students' performance, and (3) interpretation methods for drawing inferences from the performance evidence collected. These three elements-cognition, observation, and interpretation-must be explicitly connected and designed as a coordinated whole. Section II summarizes research and theory on thinking and learning which should serve as the source of the cognition element of the assessment triangle. This large body of research suggests aspects of student achievement that one would want to make inferences about, and the types of observations, or tasks, that will provide evidence to support those inferences. Also described are significant advances in methods of educational measurement that make new approaches to assessment feasible. The argument is presented that measurement models, which are statistical examples of the interpretation element of the assessment triangle, are cuuently available to support the kinds of inferences about student achievement that cognitive science suggests are important to pursue. Section III describes how the contemporary understanding of cognition and methods of measurement jointly provide a set of principles and methods for guiding the processes of assessment design and use. This section explores how the scientific foundations presented in Section II play out in the design of real assessment situations ranging from classroom to large-scale testing contexts. It also considers the role of technology in enhancing assessment design and use. Section IV presents a discussion of the research, development, policy, and practice issues that must be addressed for the field of assessment to move forward and achieve the vision described in Section I.
An empirical study of goto in C code

It is nearly 50 years since Dijkstra argued that goto obscures the flow of control in program execution and urged programmers to abandon the goto statement. While past research has shown that goto is still in use, little is known about whether goto is used in the unrestricted manner that Dijkstra feared, and if it is ‘harmful’ enough to be a part of a post-release bug. We, therefore, conduct a two part empirical study (1) qualitatively analyze a statistically representative sample of 384 files from a population of almost 2 million C programming language files collected from over 11K Github repositories and find that developers use goto in C files for error handling (80.21 ± 5%) and cleaning up resources at the end of a procedure (40.36± 5%); and (2) quantitatively analyze the commit history from the release branches of six OSS projects and find that no goto statement was removed/modified in the post-release phase of four of the six projects. We conclude that developers limit themselves to using goto appropriately in most cases, and not in an unrestricted manner like Dijkstra feared, thus suggesting that goto does not appear to be harmful in practice.
Multiple Channel Interactions Explain the Protection of Sympathetic Neurons from Apoptosis Induced by Nerve Growth Factor Deprivation

We investigated the neuroprotective properties of two M-type K+ channel blockers, linopirdine and its analog XE991, in rat sympathetic neurons deprived of nerve growth factor (NGF). Linopirdine and XE991 promoted sympathetic neuronal survival 48–72 hr after NGF withdrawal in a concentration-dependent manner. Both drugs prevented neuronal apoptosis by blocking the pathway leading to the release of cytochrome c and development of “competence-to-die” after NGF deprivation. Fura-2 Ca2+ imaging showed no significant difference in intracellular free Ca2+([Ca2+]i) in the presence or absence of NGF; linopirdine and XE991, on the other hand, caused membrane depolarization and increases in [Ca2+]i. Whole-cell recordings showed that linopirdine and XE991 selectively blocked the M current at neuroprotective concentrations, although they additionally inhibited other K+ currents at high concentrations. Membrane depolarization and [Ca2+]i increases induced by linopirdine and XE991 were blocked by the Na+ channel blocker tetrodotoxin (TTX) or by the L-type Ca2+ channel antagonist nifedipine. TTX and nifedipine also prevented the neuroprotection elicited by linopirdine or XE991. We propose that Na+ channel activation amplifies the membrane depolarization produced by M channel blockade and is essential for subsequent Ca2+ entry via the L-type Ca2+ channel. The interaction of these three classes of ion channels highlights an integrated anti-apoptosis mechanism in sympathetic neurons.
10 THE TRANSCAUCASUS AND THE EXPANSION OF THE CAUCASOID-SPECIFIC HUMAN MITOCHONDRIAL DNA

The topology of the network of western Eurasian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineage clusters in the context of their expansion and spread in this geographic area is analysed. Special attention is devoted to the inner nods of the reconstructed median network tree, ancestral to mtDNA lineage clusters H and V, to the Caucasus and TransCaucasus area populations and to the problem of timing of the expansion of the Caucasoid-specific mtDNA lineage clusters in western Europe versus in the Trans-Caucasus. It appears on several examples that typical for Western Europe mtDNA lineage clusters exhibit significantly earlier expansion in the Trans-Caucasus area. Furthermore, the lineage cluster, radiating from the pre-HV node, is significantly more frequent and divergent in the Trans-Caucasus populations than it is in Europe. Meanwhile, a comparison of the Central Asian and the Trans-Caucasus area populations shows that the former have a significant share of eastern Asian-specific mtDNA lineages, which are almost absent in the latter. Finally, a picture starts to emerge, revealing an ancient Indian— Trans-Caucasian—European continuum of a significant proportion of human maternal lineage clusters, dating back to the period between the Upper and Lower Pleniglacials.
Mobile Technology and Smartphone Apps: A Diffusion of Innovations Analysis

Mobile technology and smartphone apps have seen widespread adoption in recent years. Many uses of these technologies are intended for the general public, but some uses are specific to particular domains. These technologies are innovative and worthy of study within specific domains using diffusion of innovations theory. This paper examines the diffusion of these technologies in a unique domain, that of walking the Camino de Santiago, a nearly 500 mile trek in Spain completed by over 100,000 people a year. We use a research model that relates innovation adopter categories with beliefs about characteristics of innovations and then with adoption of innovations. We present results from a survey of past and future walkers of the Camino de Santiago. We conclude that for this domain, the first part of the model is supported but the second part of the model is only partially supported.
Individual Differences in the Use of Relational Maintenance Strategies in Marriage

This study examined individual communicator variables reasoned to predict the use of relational maintenance strategies in marriage. These variables were self-monitoring, concern for appropriateness, and Machiavellianism. The study revealed that individual communicator variables were predictive of several relational maintenance strategies, especially among husbands, specifically these were the concern for appropriateness subscales of attention to social comparison information and cross-situational variability, the self-monitoring subscale of ability to modify self-presentation, and the Machiavellianism subscale of cynicism. Cross-situational variability, attention to social comparison information, cynicism, and deceit also played significant roles in wives’ use of positivity and especially network strategies, although some relationships were contrary to expectations.
Detecting multiple change points in piecewise constant hazard functions

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) suggests a sudden reduction in prostate cancer mortality rates, likely due to highly successful treatments and screening methods for early diagnosis. We are interested in understanding the impact of medical breakthroughs, treatments, or interventions, on the survival experience for a population. For this purpose, estimating the underlying hazard function, with possible time change points, would be of substantial interest, as it will provide a general picture of the survival trend and when this trend is disrupted. Increasing attention has been given to testing the assumption of a constant failure rate against a failure rate that changes at a single point in time. We expand the set of alternatives to allow for the consideration of multiple change-points, and propose a model selection algorithm using sequential testing for the piecewise constant hazard model. These methods are data driven and allow us to estimate not only the number of change points in the hazard function but where those changes occur. Such an analysis allows for better understanding of how changing medical practice affects the survival experience for a patient population. We test for change points in prostate cancer mortality rates using the NCI Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results dataset.
Cost-effective compiler directed memory prefetching and bypassing

Ever increasing memory latencies and deeper pipelines push memory farther from the processor. Prefetching techniques aim is to bridge these two gaps by fetching data in advance to both the L1 cache and the register file. Our main contribution in this paper is a hybrid approach to the prefetching problem that combines both software and hardware prefetching in a cost-effective way by needing very little hardware support and impacting minimally the design of the processor pipeline. The prefetcher is built on-top of a static memory instruction bypassing, which is in charge of bringing prefetched values in the register file. In this paper we also present a thorough analysis of the limits of both prefetching and memory instruction bypassing. We also compare our prefetching technique with a prior speculative proposal that attacked the same problem, and we show that at much lower cost, our hybrid solution is better than a realistic implementation of speculative prefetching and bypassing. On average, our hybrid implementation achieves a 13% speed-up improvement over a version with software prefetching in a subset of numerical applications and an average of 43% over a version with no software prefetching (achieving up to a 102% for specific benchmarks).
A directed polymer approach to once-oriented first passage site percolation in high dimensions

Let be a real valued random variable with a logarithmic moment generating function ( ): = lnEexp( ) for all 0. Consider a random environment {(z),z2 (d+1) }, for d 3, where the (z) are independent copies of . Let µd be the negative of the point to line time constant of once-oriented first passage site percolation on (d+1) . Consider the directed polymer in (d+1) at inverse temperature >0 with random partition function Zn( )= exp( n=1 ((k,Sk)), where denotes expectation with respect to a simple random walk {Sk} in d . Denote the free energy f() := limn! 1(1/n)ElnZn(). We use the fact that lim! 1 f()/ = µd to give very simple proofs of some upper and lower bounds for µd. The method yields in particular an asymptotic evaluation of the Gaussian last passage time constant: µd = 2ln(2d )+ o(1), as d ! 1 . In the case of a Bernoulli environment we establish upper and lower bounds for the first passage time constant p such that: p 1 C1 p p ,a sp ! 0, and p 1 C2/ln(1/p), as p ! 0, for constants C1 and C2 depending on d.
Forecasting the Change and Direction of Change in Ise Sector Indices: An Artificial Neural Network Application

We employ neural network models to forecast the direction and the level of change in Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) Composite Index and 10 sector indices. We use 7 domestic and 15 international economic variables and stock indices. Three types of forecast methods were employed for each sector stock indices and composite index. Models were estimated and trained for the period of June 1992-December 2002. Trained network models were tested through out-of-sample forecast performance for the period of January 2003-December 2003. The out-of-sample period was specifically selected for testing ability of ANN models to forecast in high volatility conditions of stock indices. The results were then evaluated both on the basis of ability to forecast the direction of change in the stock index and on the basis of total gains in terms of index points. The results indicate that the models have some ability to forecast changes in ISE Composite Index and 10 sector indices.
Représentations graphiques de fonctions et processus décisionnels Markoviens factorisés . (Graphical representations of functions and factored Markovian decision processes)

En planification theorique de la decision, le cadre des Processus Decisionnels Markoviens Factorises (Factored Markov Decision Process, FMDP) a produit des algorithmes efficaces de resolution des problemes de decisions sequentielles dans l'incertain. L'efficacite de ces algorithmes repose sur des structures de donnees telles que les Arbres de Decision ou les Diagrammes de Decision Algebriques (ADDs). Ces techniques de planification sont utilisees en Apprentissage par Renforcement par l'architecture SDYNA afin de resoudre des problemes inconnus de grandes tailles. Toutefois, l'etat-de-l'art des algorithmes d'apprentissage, de programmation dynamique et d'apprentissage par renforcement utilises par SDYNA, requiere que le probleme soit specifie uniquement a l'aide de variables binaires et/ou utilise des structures ameliorables en termes de compacite. Dans ce manuscrit, nous presentons nos travaux de recherche visant a elaborer et a utiliser une structure de donnee plus efficace et moins contraignante, et a l'integrer dans une nouvelle instance de l'architecture SDYNA. Dans une premiere partie, nous presentons l'etat-de-l'art de la modelisation de problemes de decisions sequentielles dans l'incertain a l'aide de FMDP. Nous abordons en detail la modelisation a l'aide d'DT et d'ADDs.Puis nous presentons les ORFGs, nouvelle structure de donnees que nous proposons dans cette these pour resoudre les problemes inherents aux ADDs. Nous demontrons ainsi que les ORFGs s'averent plus efficaces que les ADDs pour modeliser les problemes de grandes tailles. Dans une seconde partie, nous nous interessons a la resolution des problemes de decision dans l'incertain par Programmation Dynamique. Apres avoir introduit les principaux algorithmes de resolution, nous nous attardons sur leurs variantes dans le domaine factorise. Nous precisons les points de ces variantes factorisees qui sont ameliorables. Nous decrivons alors une nouvelle version de ces algorithmes qui ameliore ces aspects et utilise les ORFGs precedemment introduits. Dans une derniere partie, nous abordons l'utilisation des FMDPs en Apprentissage par Renforcement. Puis nous presentons un nouvel algorithme d'apprentissage dedie a la nouvelle structure que nous proposons. Grâce a ce nouvel algorithme, une nouvelle instance de l'architecture SDYNA est proposee, se basant sur les ORFGs ~:~l'instance SPIMDDI. Nous testons son efficacite sur quelques problemes standards de la litterature. Enfin nous presentons quelques travaux de recherche autour de cette nouvelle instance. Nous evoquons d'abord un nouvel algorithme de gestion du compromis exploration-exploitation destine a simplifier l'algorithme F-RMax. Puis nous detaillons une application de l'instance SPIMDDI a la gestion d'unites dans un jeu video de strategie en temps reel.
Spacetime constraints revisited

The Spacetime Constraints (SC) paradigm, whereby the animator specifies what an animated figure should do but not how to do it, is a very appealing approach to animation. However, the algorithms available for realizing the SC approach are limited. Current techniques are local in nature: they all use some kind of perturbational analysis to refine an initial trajectory. We propose a global search algorithm that is capable of generating multiple novel trajectories for SC problems from scratch. The key elements of our search strategy are a method for encoding trajectories as behaviors, and a genetic search algorithm for choosing behavior parameters that is currently implemented on a massively parallel computer. We describe the algorithm and show computed solutions to SC problems for 2D articulated figures. CR Categories: I.2. 6 [Artificial Intelligence]: Learning— parameter learning. I.2. 6 [Artificial Intelligence]: Problem Solving, Control Methods and Search—heuristic methods. I.3. 7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism— animation. I.6. 3 [Simulation and Modeling]: Applications. Additional
Health Expectancies in Adults Aged 50 Years or Older in China

Objective: The purpose of this study is to understand the functional health of older adults in China and to assess the potential for advancing healthy and active aging. Method: Data of 13,739 older adults aged 50 years and older from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in 2011 were analyzed. Life expectancy in good perceived health, chronic-disease-free life expectancy, active life expectancy, and severe impairment-free life expectancy were calculated using Sullivan’s method. Results: At age 50 years, older adults had a life expectancy in good perceived health of 7.0 and 6.7 years in men and women, respectively. They would remain chronic-disease-free for 8.4 and 8.6 years, without activity limitation for 23.6 and 26.0 years, and severe impairment-free for 21.4 and 24.2 years. Discussion: The world’s largest aging population was spending a substantial proportion of remaining life years in suboptimal health and well-being, while remaining largely independent in basic self-care without severe impairments.
Causal path modeling: what it does and what it does not tell us

This paper attempts to demystify the technique of causal path modeling for the non‐specialists by presenting aspects of its value for social science and management research and by illustrating common misunderstandings about its attributes. Special emphasis is placed on the real world validity of causal relationships depicted in causal path models and on the information that the data‐fitting properties of causal path models provide regarding this issue. Causal path models that are based on research in antecedents of career success are used to illustrate the points that are made. It is stressed that the validity of causal relationships depicted in causal path models is subject to exactly the same methodological restrictions as the validity of causality claims that are made without the use of causal path modeling; and that the purpose of using quantitative techniques in causal path modeling is not to improve certainty on causality direction.
Rap1-PDZ-GEF1 interacts with a neurotrophin receptor at late endosomes, leading to sustained activation of Rap1 and ERK and neurite outgrowth

Neurotrophins, such as NGF and BDNF, induce sustained activation of Rap1 small G protein and ERK, which are essential for neurite outgrowth. We show involvement of a GDP/GTP exchange factor (GEF) for Rap1, PDZ-GEF1, in these processes. PDZ-GEF1 is activated by GTP-Rap1 via a positive feedback mechanism. Upon NGF binding, the TrkA neurotrophin receptor is internalized from the cell surface, passes through early endosomes, and arrives in late endosomes. A tetrameric complex forms between PDZ-GEF1, synaptic scaffolding molecule and ankyrin repeat-rich membrane spanning protein which interacts directly with the TrkA receptor. At late endosomes, the complex induces sustained activation of Rap1 and ERK, resulting in neurite outgrowth. In cultured rat hippocampal neurons, PDZ-GEF1 is recruited to late endosomes in a BDNF-dependent manner involved in BDNF-induced neurite outgrowth. Thus, the interaction of PDZ-GEF1 with an internalized neurotrophin receptor transported to late endosomes induces sustained activation of both Rap1 and ERK and neurite outgrowth.