Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
banner above paper title Transaction Polymorphism in Java

Concurrent implementations of abstract types usually rely on lock-free primitives or locks and are highly tuned to support a finite set of efficient operations. However, it is very hard to extend such types for specific needs by adding new operations. The synchronization based on memory transactions, which is generally less efficient than based on lock-free primitives or locks, has been proposed in part to address this issue by ensuring that any set of transactional operations can run concurrently. This paper introduces transaction polymorphism, a synchronization technique that consists of providing more control to the programmer than traditional (monomorphic) transactions to achieve comparable performance to generic lock-based and lock-free solutions. We show in this paper that, maybe unsurprisingly, monomorphic transactions cannot reach the level of concurrency obtained with locks. As a drawback of sharing the same semantics that needs to be strong enough for various operations, monomorphic transactions seriously underutilize the concurrency potential of such operations. We describe a Java polymorphic transactional memory that includes three distinct transaction types, which we compare against four existing (monomorphic) STMs, as well as against existing lock-based and lock-free synchronization on a collection micro-benchmark and on the STMBench7 macrobenchmark. Our results show that polymorphism can be at least 2.4 times faster than any of these alternatives on 64 threads.
Age-specific reproductive investment in female burying beetles: independent effects of state and risk of death

Summary 1. How much should an individual invest in reproduction as it grows older? Answering this question involves determining whether individuals measure their age as the time left for future reproduction or as the rate of deterioration in their state. Theory suggests that in the former case individuals should increase their allocation of resources to reproduction as opportunities for future breeding dwindle, and terminally invest when they breed for the last time. In the latter case they should reduce their investment in reproduction with age, either through adaptive reproductive restraint or as a passive by-product of senescence. 2. Here we present the results of experiments on female burying beetles, Nicrophorus vespilloides, in which we independently manipulated the perceived risk of death (by activating the immune system) and the extent of deterioration in state (by changing age of first reproduction and/or prior investment in reproduction). 3. We found that the risk of death and state each independently influenced the extent of reproductive investment. Specifically, we found a state-dependent decline in reproductive investment as females grew older that could be attributed to both adaptive reproductive restraint and senescence. A perceived increase in the risk of death, induced by activation of the immune system, caused females to switch from a strategy of reproductive restraint to terminal investment. Nevertheless, absolute reproductive investment was lower in older females, indicating constraints of senescence. 4. Our results show that a decline in reproductive investment with age does not necessarily constitute evidence of reproductive senescence but can also result from adaptive reproductive restraint. 5. Our results further suggest that the extent of reproductive investment is dependent on several different intrinsic cues and that the particular blend of cues available at any given age can yield very different patterns of investment. Perhaps this explains why age-related reproductive investment patterns seen in nature are so diverse.
NCR 3700 - The Next-Generation Industrial Database Computer

Andrew Witkowski, Felipe Carifio, and Pekka Kostamaa NCR/Teradata Advanced Concepts Laboratory (TACL) 100 N. Sepulveda Blvd. El Segundo, CA 90245 Abstract The iVCR 3700 is our next-generation general purpose computer. Its design benefited from 10 years of Teradata DBC/1012 industrial experience, with which we hold a 70% market share in commercial VLDB applications. The NCR 3700 will be sold as a large parallel Unix system, and as a database computer. The NCR 3700 can run third party merchant databases, as well as the Teradata relational DBMS. Readers should keep in mind that all the &sign decisions assume VLDB (multi-terabyte) size applications. The NCR 3700 and the DBC/1012 have a close symbiotic relationship between the hardware and the software. The operating system and hardware contain features and extensions used by the database to exploit parallelism. This paper describes the NCR 3700 architecture, hardware capabilities, the BYNEITM interconnection network, the Unix/NS operating system, and the Teradata relational database. We describe our notion of a Trusted Parallel Applicafion (TPA) that runs under our extended Unix operating system, UnixINS. The most important TPA is the Teradata relational database. Real-world VLDB systems have difficult system administration problems. We conclude the paper by describing one of these problems, namely, the loading of massive amounts of data. The NCR 3700 computer and database software were designed to efficiently run new multi-terabyte level VLDB applications well into the 21st century.
A novel lane feature extraction algorithm based on digital interpolation

This paper presents a novel lane edge feature extraction algorithm based on digital interpolation. Zooming towards the vanishing point of the lanes creates a visual effect of driving. The positions of the lanes should not change significantly on the image plane while the vehicle is moving along the lanes. Considering the position information, more accurate lane features can be extracted. A gradient based vanishing point detection algorithm is incorporated to select the zooming area. The proposed algorithm shows outstanding performance on extracting features belonging solely to the lanes from severe noise environment. The algorithm is capable of removing non-relevant features produced by shadows, other vehicles, trees, buildings etc. The extracted feature map was tested with a classic lane detection algorithm, used in LOIS system. The detection results show that the improved feature map is an important factor to the performance of the whole system.
Bomb radiocarbon in the Pacific: Annual and seasonal timescale variations

Author(s): Druffel, ER; Druffel, ER | Abstract: Banded corals are used as proxy recorders of bomb radiocarbon in the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Bomb radiocarbon levels appeared to still be rising in the tropical Pacific by 1982, in contrast to temperate locations that peaked in the early 1970's. This is representative of the geostrophic transport of bomb-laden waters from higher latitudes toward the equator. The seasonal radiocarbon signal at Canton Island (3S, 172W) during the early 1970's was twice the amplitude of that at Fanning Island (4N, 159W), and the radiocarbon minima at these locations were offset by several months. The phase lag is caused primarily by the seasonally variant transequatorial Ekman transport, which funnels more upwelled, 14C-poor water from summer to winter hemisphere. The seasonal variation of Δ14C at Canton is larger because the peak input of 14C-poor South Equatorial Current water is coincident with the period of greatest transequatorial Ekman transport to this region. Whereas, at the Fanning site, these inputs reach their maxima during opposing seasons, which causes a damping of the seasonal Δ14C signal. A time-stepped, multi-box model calculation is made to describe bomb radiocarbon distributions in the tropical Pacific, and hence to determine the influence of the South Equatorial Current flow on the chemistry of the central equatorial Pacific. The annual model results show that radiocarbon is influenced to a minor extent by this lateral flow, in agreement with previous studies. However, the seasonal version of the model reveals that the South Equatorial Current flow varies by a factor of 2–3 in order to explain the seasonal variations in bomb radiocarbon. Meridional geostrophic convergence and transequatorial Ekman transport from summer to winter hemisphere alone are not sufficient for defining the observed seasonal signals.
An FPGA-accelerated partial duplicate image retrieval engine for a document search system

In this paper, we introduce an FPGA-accelerated partial image retrieval engine, suitable for a visualized document search system. To achieve efficient sharing and reuse of digitized documents, this system has the function of partial duplicate image retrieval. To meet the demand for stability and speed, we introduced a brute-force matching of the BRIEF descriptor with two step scheme and an FPGA accelerator with a thoroughly parallelized and pipelined architecture to educe the potential of the FPGA. The FPGA accelerator significantly improves the runtime performance of the engine. It is about 65 times better than a CPU-based solution on average. Ultimately, we developed a prototype document search system, and the proposed engine contributes to the intuitive retrieval and quick response of the system.
Importance of solar subsurface heating in ocean general circulation models

The importance of subsurface heating on surface mixed layer properties in an ocean general circulation model (OGCM) is examined using attenuation of solar irradiance with depth below the ocean surface. The depth-dependent attenuation of subsurface heating is given by global monthly mean fields for the attenuation of photosynthetically available radiation (PAR), kPAR. These global fields of kPAR are derived from Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) data on the spectral diffuse attenuation coefficient at 490 nm (k490), and have been processed to have the smoothly varying and continuous coverage necessary for use in OGCM applications. These monthly fields provide the first complete global data sets of subsurface optical fields that can be used for OGCM applications of subsurface heating and bio-optical processes. The effect on global OGCM prediction of sea surface temperature (SST) and surface mixed layer depth (MLD) is examined when solar heating, as given by monthly mean kPAR and PAR fields, is included in the model. It is found that subsurface heating yields a marked increase in the SST predictive skill of the OGCM at low latitudes. No significant improvement in MLD predictive skill is obtained when including subsurface heating. Use of the monthly mean kPAR produces an SST decrease of up to 0.8°C and a MLD increase of up to only 4–5 m for climatological surface forcing, with this primarily confined to the equatorial regions. Remarkably, a constant kPAR value of 0.06 m−1, which is indicative of optically clear open ocean conditions, is found to serve very well for OGCM prediction of SST and MLD over most of the global ocean.
Programming distributed fault tolerant systems: the replicAda approach

During the last years, several toolkits for programming faulttolerant distributed systems have been proposed. Unfortunately, most of them offer a low level interface that is difficult to program and is not well integrated with a high level language. On the other hand, the Annex E of the Ada language provides a high level framework for programming distributed systems. After carefully studying it, we have concluded that nothing prevents an implementation of the Annex E that also offers support for programming fault-tolerant distributed systems. We propose to implement most of the fault tolerance mechanisms at the Partition Communication Subsystem (PCS) level, offering to the programmer the abstraction of replicated partitions, while preserving the semantics of the Annex E. Parameters related to fault tolerance can be selected at configuration time. This approach, that we have named replicAda, tries to simplify the programming of fault tolerant distributed systems by providing high level abstractions that are well integrated with the Ada language.
An optimized Extended Kalman Filter for speed sensorless direct troque control of an induction motor

This paper presents a new approach of optimizing the performance of an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) using particle swarm optimization (PSO) for speed estimation of an induction motor drive. The development of the EKF algorithm and selection of the filter covariance for the EKF based speed estimation are presented and discussed. The effectiveness of the optimization technique is verified through Matlab/Simulink simulation of a direct torque control (DTC) drive system under various operating conditions.
Framework for intrusion detection in IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh networks

Intrusion detection system is one of the possible solutions to timely detect the intrusions and alarm for appropriate action. So far many intrusion detection systems have been proposed for ad-hoc networks, however due to the different characteristics, such intrusion detection systems cannot perform well in wireless mesh networks environment. In this paper, we propose a new framework of intrusion detection systems exclusively for wireless mesh networks. This paper will serve as a baseline guide for investigating intrusion detection systems for large scale multi-hop wireless broadband networks.
Lightweight Structured Visualization of Assembler Control Flow Based on Regular Expressions

RegVIS is a tool for viewing directed graphs with start and end nodes. It applies a new visualization technique, which uses regular expressions as a meta-representation of all the paths in an input graph, the result is a containment-based and structured visualization of that graph. The tool can be configured to derive these regular expressions from the input graph using either the Brzozowski algebraic method or the transitive closure method. Regvis can be used in combination with the binary code analysis tool IDA (Interactive Disassembler), either integrated or standalone, to view the control flow graph (CFG) of assembler code. The resulting visualization, which restructures the control flow and can thus help reduce program comprehension efforts, is called control flow blocks (CFB). In this paper, we present the workings of regVIS and evaluate the new CFB visualization it produces against the traditional CFG visualization in an explorative user study. The study suggests that the CFB is better for analyzing and navigating along specific execution paths, while the CFG is better for getting an overview of the overall control flow.
Epoxyeicosatrienoic Acids Contribute With Altered Nitric Oxide and Endothelin-1 Pathways to Conduit Artery Endothelial Dysfunction in Essential Hypertension

Background— We sought to clarify, using functional and biological approaches, the role of epoxyeicosatrienoic acids, nitric oxide (NO)/reactive oxygen species balance, and endothelin-1 in conduit artery endothelial dysfunction during essential hypertension. Methods and Results— Radial artery diameter and mean wall shear stress were determined in 28 untreated patients with essential hypertension and 30 normotensive control subjects during endothelium-dependent flow-mediated dilatation induced by hand skin heating. The role of epoxyeicosatrienoic acids and NO was assessed with the brachial infusion of inhibitors of cytochrome P450 epoxygenases (fluconazole) and NO synthase (NG-monomethyl-L-arginine [L-NMMA]). Compared with controls, hypertensive patients exhibited a decreased flow-mediated dilatation in response to postischemic hyperemia as well as to heating, as shown by the lesser slope of their diameter–shear stress relationship. In controls, heating-induced flow-mediated dilatation was reduced by fluconazole, L-NMMA, and, to a larger extent, by L-NMMA+fluconazole. In patients, flow-mediated dilatation was not affected by fluconazole and was reduced by L-NMMA and L-NMMA+fluconazole to a lesser extent than in controls. Furthermore, local plasma epoxyeicosatrienoic acids increased during heating in controls (an effect diminished by fluconazole) but not in patients. Plasma nitrite, an indicator of NO availability, increased during heating in controls (an effect abolished by L-NMMA) and, to a lesser extent, in patients, whereas, inversely, reactive oxygen species increased more in patients (an effect diminished by L-NMMA). Plasma endothelin-1 decreased during heating in controls but not in patients. Conclusions— These results show that an impaired role of epoxyeicosatrienoic acids contributes, together with an alteration in NO/reactive oxygen species balance and endothelin-1 pathway, to conduit artery endothelial dysfunction in essential hypertension. Clinical Trial Registration— https://www.eudract. ema.europa. eu. Unique identifier: RCB2007-A001–10-53.
Image Segmentation with Genetic Clustering Using Weighted Combination of Particle Swarm Optimization

Data Clustering is one of the most popular techniques in data mining and machine learningthat can be used in image analysis. K-means algorithm is a famous clustering algorithm in data mining because of its high operational speed and easy implementation. However, some problems such as sensitivity to initial data or getting trapped at local optimal hinder its performance.In this paper, the strength of genetic algorithm is utilized on the Kmeans method, developing a new approach in which the center of clusters are optimized and selected appropriately. To increase the performance of the proposed algorithm, the weighted particle swarm optimization is used to solve the risk of getting trapped in local optimal. The evaluation results of the proposed algorithm and its comparison with similar function algorithms in literature confirmsits better performance and higher efficiency.
Monitoring environmental health using SPOT-VEGETATION-derived and field-measured spectral indices in Karabash, Russia

The objective of this study was to use satellite imagery combined with field-based spectral analysis to assess the impacts of mining-related activities on vegetation around the smelter town of Karabash, South Ural Mountains of Russia. Time series analysis of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) images derived from Système Pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT)-VEGETATION was combined with the analysis of vegetation stress indices calculated from 140 in situ spectral measurements. Correlation analyses have revealed that vegetation stress affects vegetation density and resilience, and that it impedes a gradual increase in photosynthetic activity in the most affected areas ranging up to 10 km from the smelter. The prolongation of the growing season of healthier vegetation at greater distances, showing higher vegetation density, lower variation, and a more positive trend over time, can possibly be related to climate change. Although land cover shows a concentric pattern around Karabash, the analysis revealed that both spectral and time series-derived indices are defined more by the distance to the Karabash smelter and vegetation stress, rather than by the land cover class.
A functionally active protein import complex from

Isolated outer chloroplast envelope membranes were solubilized by digitonin and separated on linear sucrose density gradients. A membrane complex was recovered from the gradients and exhibited characteristics of a protein import apparatus, i.e. the interaction of the complex with the precursor polypeptides depends on the presence of a transit sequence, ATP and protease-sensitive components. Furthermore, trans-location intermediates detected in the organellar system are also found after interaction of the precursor polypeptide with the isolated import complex.
The Mw 7.1 Van, Eastern Turkey, earthquake 2011: two-point source modelling by iterative deconvolution and non-negative least squares

s, 2012 August 19–24, Moscow. Atzori, S. , Tolomei, C. , Salvi, S. & Zoffoli, S. , 2011. Co-seismic ground displacement and preliminary source models from the 10/23/2011, Mw7.2 Van Earthquake, Eastern Turkey. Sigris Activation Report—PR6 PR7. Available at: www.sigris. it,10.1093/gji/ggt386.html (last accessed
Circular Nodes in Neural Networks

In the usual construction of a neural network, the individual nodes store and transmit real numbers that lie in an interval on the real line; the values are often envisioned as amplitudes. In this article we present a design for a circular node, which is capable of storing and transmitting angular information. We develop the forward and backward propagation formulas for a network containing circular nodes. We show how the use of circular nodes may facilitate the characterization and parameterization of periodic phenomena in general. We describe applications to constructing circular self-maps, periodic compression, and one-dimensional manifold decomposition. We show that a circular node may be used to construct a homeomorphism between a trefoil knot in ℝ3 and a unit circle. We give an application with a network that encodes the dynamic system on the limit cycle of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. This is achieved by incorporating a circular node in the bottleneck layer of a three-hidden-layer bottleneck network architecture. Exploiting circular nodes systematically offers a neural network alternative to Fourier series decomposition in approximating periodic or almost periodic functions.
The [PSI +] Prion Exists as a Dynamic Cloud of Variants

[PSI +] is an amyloid-based prion of Sup35p, a subunit of the translation termination factor. Prion “strains” or “variants” are amyloids with different conformations of a single protein sequence, conferring different phenotypes, but each relatively faithfully propagated. Wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae isolates have SUP35 alleles that fall into three groups, called reference, Δ19, and E9, with limited transmissibility of [PSI +] between cells expressing these different polymorphs. Here we show that prion transmission pattern between different Sup35 polymorphs is prion variant-dependent. Passage of one prion variant from one Sup35 polymorph to another need not change the prion variant. Surprisingly, simple mitotic growth of a [PSI +] strain results in a spectrum of variant transmission properties among the progeny clones. Even cells that have grown for >150 generations continue to vary in transmission properties, suggesting that simple variant segregation is insufficient to explain the results. Rather, there appears to be continuous generation of a cloud of prion variants, with one or another becoming stochastically dominant, only to be succeeded by a different mixture. We find that among the rare wild isolates containing [PSI +], all indistinguishably “weak” [PSI +], are several different variants based on their transmission efficiencies to other Sup35 alleles. Most show some limitation of transmission, indicating that the evolved wild Sup35 alleles are effective in limiting the spread of [PSI +]. Notably, a “strong [PSI +]” can have any of several different transmission efficiency patterns, showing that “strong” versus “weak” is insufficient to indicate prion variant uniformity.