Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bus-Invert Coding For Low Noise 2eSST VME64x Block Transfers

The VME64x standard defines a double edge source synchronous block transfer (2eSST) capable to sustain a data transfer rate up to 320 MByte/s on the VMEbus. This level of performance is achieved by double edge clocking a 64-bit bus with bursts of data strobe pulses. The switching activity of such a wide bus on a shared backplane challenges the signal integrity and the data transfer reliability. The Bus-Invert is a well known coding technique developed to lower the peak power dissipation in I/O busses by decreasing their switching activity. It has been originally proposed for lowering the power consumption of CMOS VLSI devices and so reducing the on-chip line coupling and noise. In this paper we discuss how the Bus-Invert coding can be applied to improve the 2eSST performance. A custom designed board-set has been used to characterize jitter, noise and power consumption with different data patterns, coding schemes and bus loading conditions. The hardware overheads introduced by the encoding algorithm is discussed in the view of deployments in low-latency, real-time applications.
Visualization of vasculature with convolution surfaces: method, validation and evaluation

We present a method for visualizing vasculature based on clinical computed tomography or magnetic resonance data. The vessel skeleton as well as the diameter information per voxel serve as input. Our method adheres to these data, while producing smooth transitions at branchings and closed, rounded ends by means of convolution surfaces. We examine the filter design with respect to irritating bulges, unwanted blending and the correct visualization of the vessel diameter. The method has been applied to a large variety of anatomic trees. We discuss the validation of the method by means of a comparison to other visualization methods. Surface distance measures are carried out to perform a quantitative validation. Furthermore, we present the evaluation of the method which has been accomplished on the basis of a survey by 11 radiologists and surgeons.
Design Strategies for Efficient Access to Mobile Device Users via Amazon Mechanical Turk

It is often challenging to access a pool of mobile device users and instruct them to perform an interactive task. Yet such data is often vital to provide design insight at various stages of the design process of a mobile application, service or system. We propose accessing a pool of mobile device users via the microtask market Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). While mobile device users are still a minority on MTurk, they provide unique opportunities for requesters. Not only does catering to mobile device users expand the potential worker pool, but also offers access to realistic in situ mobile sensor data for a variety of pervasive computing applications. We present a design pattern that makes it easy to crowdsource tasks to mobile device users. We demonstrate this pattern to obtain sensor availability information for some of the most popular mobile device sensors, using HTML5 web APIs to access them. We find that there is a sizable pool of mobile workers and we present two design strategies for efficiently accessing them. The first enables direct fast access to a small pool of mobile-only device users. The second strategy exploits our finding that a large number of desktop-based crowd workers are prepared to switch to their mobile device if prompted by a well-designed mobile task. Finally we discuss solution principles for sensor-dependent mobile systems and studies that will be underpinned by mobile device crowd workers.
A Secure Test Wrapper Design Against Internal and Boundary Scan Attacks for Embedded Cores

This paper presents a secure test wrapper (STW) design that is compatible with the IEEE 1500 standard. STW protects not only internal scan chains but also primary inputs and outputs, which may contain critical information (such as encryption keys) during the system operation. To reduce the STW area, flip-flops in the wrapper boundary cells also serve as the LFSR to generate the golden key. Experimental results on an AES core show that STW provides very high security at the price of only 5% area overhead with respect to the original IEEE 1500 test wrapper.
A Temporal Validation of Scoring Algorithms for the 7-Day Physical Activity Recall

The 7-day physical activity recall (PAR) is one of the most commonly used activity assessments in the exercise science field. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the convergent validity of several PAR-scoring algorithms against a temporally matched measure from an accelerometry-based activity monitor. The participants (n = 24) in the study wore a Tritrac monitor for a period of 8 days and completed a structured PAR interview to recall their activity over the same time frame. The raw energy expenditure (EE) estimate from the Tritrac was found to underpredict the magnitude of the PAR estimate, but the correlation between measures was high (r = .72). The correspondence in EE was better, and the correlation between measures were higher (r = .84 to r = .95) when alternative PAR and Tritrac scoring algorithms were tested. There was no evidence of memory decay, as the correlation remained consistent across all 7 days of recall. The results support the continued use of the PAR for exercise science and epidemiological research and suggest that an alternative PAR scoring system that incorporates sitting time as rest may improve the validity of the assessment.
Is 1980s Sociology in the Doldrums?

Recent feelings of malaise about the condition of sociology confuse the institutional level of the profession's material support with sociology's intellectual content. The "crisis" has been largely the result of a very rapid increase in the number of sociologists in the late 1960s and the 1970s, which has not only caused career problems but has brought increased specialization and mutual metatheoretical recriminations among contending specialties. Both the touting of new quantitative methodologies and the antipositivism of opposing camps tend to operate as ideologies for particular specialties and to obscure the substantive advances that are possible. A number of areas in which creative work is likely to go on in the next 10 years are sketched: historical change; emotion versus cognition; the micro-macro connection; an integrated theory of organizations, networks, and markets; and sex and gender.
Global Intrusion Detection in the DOMINO Overlay System

Sharing data between widely distributed intrusion detection systems offers the possibility of significant improvements in speed and accuracy over isolated systems. In this paper, we describe and evaluate DOMINO (Distributed Overlay for Monitoring InterNet Outbreaks); an architecture for a distributed intrusion detection system that fosters collaboration among heterogeneous nodes organized as an overlay network. The overlay design enables DOMINO to be heterogeneous, scalable, and robust to attacks and failures. An important component of DOMINO’s design is the use of active-sink nodes which respond to and measure connections to unused IP addresses. This enables efficient detection of attacks from spoofed IP sources, reduces false positives, enables attack classification and production of timely blacklists. We evaluate the capabilities and performance of DOMINO using a large set of intrusion logs collected from over 1600 providers across the Internet. Our analysis demonstrates the significant marginal benefit obtained from distributed intrusion data sources coordinated through a system like DOMINO. We also evaluate how to configure DOMINO in order to maximize performance gains from the perspectives of blacklist length, blacklist freshness and IP proximity. We perform a retrospective analysis on the 2002 SQL-Snake and 2003 SQL-Slammer epidemics that highlights how information exchange through DOMINO would have reduced the reaction time and false-alarm rates during outbreaks. Finally, we provide preliminary results from our prototype active-sink deployment that illustrates the limited variability in the sink traffic and the feasibility of efficient classification and discrimination of attack types. ∗The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes, notwithstanding any copyright notices affixed thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors, and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the above government agencies or the U.S. Government.
Biologically-Inspired Visual Attention Features for a Vehicle Classification Task

Abstract The continuous rise in the number of vehicles in circulation brings an increasing need for automatically and efficiently recognizing vehicle categories for multiple applications such as optimizing available parking spaces, balancing ferry loads, planning infrastructure and managing traffic, or servicing vehicles. This paper explores the use of human visual attention mechanisms to identify a set of features that allows for fast automated classification of vehicles based on images taken from 6 viewpoints. Salient visual features classified with a series of binary support vector machines and complemented by a dissimilarity score achieve average classification rates between 94% and 97.3% for five-category vehicle classification depending on the combination of viewpoints used. The viewpoints that make the most important contribution to the classification are identified in order to decrease the implementation cost. The evaluation of performance against other feature descriptors and various approaches for vehicle classification shows that the proposed solution obtains results comparable to the best ones reported in the literature.
A study of the quality and hygienic conditions of spring water in Mongolia.

UNLABELLED An assessment on quality and hygienic conditions of spring water was undertaken in Mongolia in 2004 with financial and technical support from the World Health Organization through AGFUND. METHODOLOGY A total of 127 springs, 99 from rural areas and 28 from Ulaanbaatar city were included in the study. The study included hygienic conditions, physical, microbiological and chemical parameters of springs. Based on the results of laboratory analysis, the quality of springs were classified into five degrees of contamination. RESULTS The majority of springs studied and especially in UB city and the Central region had poor hygienic conditions such as low flow rate, turbidity or pollution sources in the vicinity of springs. 78% of the total studied springs did not have any protection or upgrade and 22% have only wooden, iron and stone fences. The water quality parameters such as hardness, total dissolved solids, oxygen demand, nitrogenous compounds, total microbial count, Escherichia coli were also significantly higher in springs located in UB city, the Central region and the East region. 47.6% of all studied aimag's (countryside) spring water were significantly polluted by more than three parameters especially E. coli, ammonia, oxygen demand, which indicated a recent contamination by human and animal excreta in water. CONCLUSION The current study revealed that the majority of springs in peri urban areas close to UB city and the Central region had poor hygienic conditions. Different levels of contamination using both microbiological and chemical tests were found in studied springs. It is recommended that regular assessment of spring water quality be undertaken to create awareness among communities and local authorities for further protection and upgrading of spring water sources.
Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research

Significance There is increasing concern about the reproducibility of scientific research. For example, the costs associated with irreproducible preclinical research alone have recently been estimated at US$28 billion a year in the United States. However, there are currently no mechanisms in place to quickly identify findings that are unlikely to replicate. We show that prediction markets are well suited to bridge this gap. Prediction markets set up to estimate the reproducibility of 44 studies published in prominent psychology journals and replicated in The Reproducibility Project: Psychology predict the outcomes of the replications well and outperform a survey of individual forecasts. Concerns about a lack of reproducibility of statistically significant results have recently been raised in many fields, and it has been argued that this lack comes at substantial economic costs. We here report the results from prediction markets set up to quantify the reproducibility of 44 studies published in prominent psychology journals and replicated in the Reproducibility Project: Psychology. The prediction markets predict the outcomes of the replications well and outperform a survey of market participants’ individual forecasts. This shows that prediction markets are a promising tool for assessing the reproducibility of published scientific results. The prediction markets also allow us to estimate probabilities for the hypotheses being true at different testing stages, which provides valuable information regarding the temporal dynamics of scientific discovery. We find that the hypotheses being tested in psychology typically have low prior probabilities of being true (median, 9%) and that a “statistically significant” finding needs to be confirmed in a well-powered replication to have a high probability of being true. We argue that prediction markets could be used to obtain speedy information about reproducibility at low cost and could potentially even be used to determine which studies to replicate to optimally allocate limited resources into replications.
Exploiting Coarse-Grained Parallelism in B+ Tree Searches on an APU

B+ tree structured index searches are one of the fundamental database operations and hence, accelerating them is essential. GPUs provide a compelling mix of performance per watt and performance per dollar, and thus are an attractive platform for accelerating B+ tree searches. However, tree search on discrete GPUs presents significant challenges for acceleration due to (i) the irregular representation in memory and (ii) the requirement to copy the tree to the GPU memory over the PCIe bus. In this paper, we present the acceleration of B+ tree searches on a fused CPU+GPU processor (an accelerated processing unit or APU). We counter the aforementioned issues by reorganizing the B+ tree in memory and utilizing the novel heterogeneous system architecture, which eliminates (i) the need to copy the tree to the GPU and (ii) the limitation on the size of the tree that can be accelerated. Our approach exploits the coarse-grained parallelism in tree search, wherein we execute multiple searches in parallel to optimize for the SIMD width without modifying the inherent B+ tree data structure. Our results illustrate that the APU implementation can perform up to 70M1 queries per second and is 4.9x faster in the best case and 2.5x faster on average than a hand-tuned, SSE-optimized, six-core CPU implementation, for varying orders of the B+ tree with 4M keys. We also present an analysis of the effect of caches on performance, and of the efficacy of the APU to eliminate data-copies.
Reassessment of Genotype 1 Hepatitis C Virus Subtype Misclassification by LiPA 2.0: Implications for Direct-Acting Antiviral Treatment

ABSTRACT The accuracy of LiPA 2.0 for hepatitis C virus 1 (HCV-1) subtype classification was analyzed. LiPA 2.0 genotype results from 101 HCV-1-infected patients were compared to genotype findings determined by direct core sequencing. Eleven (11%) samples were misclassified. Given the influence of the HCV-1-subtype in the anti-HCV therapy response, an alternative classification method is warranted.
Affecting the Future

The aim of this qualitative study was to investigate chronic pain patients' perceptions of the pain-future relation, more specifically, of the way such perceptions affect: (1) well-being and coping; (2) psychosocial organization/adaptation; and (3) experienced agency in a clinical context. In-depth interviews with 18 chronic pain patients were conducted in order to generate categories describing the influence of chronic pain on the patient's perception of the future. The analysis resulted in six general conceptual patterns: diagnosis - `a signpost' to the future; changes in prospective thinking and feeling; `frozen futures'; changed strategies for coping with the future; perceived degree of agency; and approaches to handling conflicts in a clinical setting. The results call for more `time empathy' in patient-doctor encounters.
Guidelines for Implementing A Classroom Reward System

When special education teachers consult with regular classroom teachers, they frequently are asked about how to set up a reward system for a classroom. This article presents a practical sequence for setting up a group reward system and some guidelines for making key decisions about implementation and termination of the program. Reward systems that can be used with all members of a class take careful planning and thought. One first-year teacher, despairing of her lack of control, brought in a bag of lemon drops and announced to the class that all children who were good would receive a lemon drop at the end of the day. While the announcement got the students' attention, it generated a number of control problems. The teacher quickly learned that she had no method for monitoring "good" behavior or any criteria by which to decide who should not receive the lemon drops. Some students began in earnest to determine what "being good" meant and if "being good" the last hour of the day would suffice. A second group,
Maternal and birth anthropometric characteristics in relation to the risk of childhood lymphomas: a Swedish nationwide cohort study

This Swedish nationwide cohort study aims to examine the role of maternal characteristics (maternal age, education, smoking, BMI, diabetes, and preeclampsia) and multiple intrauterine growth measures on the risk of childhood lymphomas. A total of 3 444 136 singleton live births registered in the Swedish Medical Birth Register were analyzed, among whom there were 515 incident non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) cases and 169 Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) cases aged 0–14 years at diagnosis (1973–2007) identified through linkage with the Swedish Cancer Register. Proportional hazards models were used to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) of NHL and HL. Male sex (HR=2.00, 95% CI: 1.66–2.41), older maternal age (HR=1.03, 95% CI: 1.00–1.06, per 1-year increase), and large for gestational age compared with appropriate for gestational age (AGA) birth weight (HR=1.83, 95% CI: 1.20–2.79) were correlated with the risk of NHL; of note, in subanalysis by sex, the latter association was confined to girls (HR=3.37, 95% CI: 1.90–5.97, Pinteraction by sex=0.008). The risk of childhood HL overall was more evident among boys (HR=2.03, 95% CI: 1.46–2.81), whereas indices of accelerated fetal growth were not convincingly associated with the risk of HL. Apart from the established association with sex, the findings point to accelerated intrauterine growth as a risk factor for childhood NHL that may differ by sex. Given the rarity of this condition at birth, however, further studies with more elaborate indices are needed to conclude on its association with rare diseases such as HL.
An approach to acquire semantic relationships between terms

This paper focuses on the automatic acquisition of semantic relationships from Chinese corpus, motivated by improving the performances of our QA systems named NL-WAS. Linguistic patterns designed for Chinese sentences are applied to a collection of texts to extract synonymy relationship, hyponymy relationship, and meronymy relationship. Patterns are broken down into unambiguous and ambiguous, and different strategies are adopted to refine the candidates extracted using this two kinds of patterns. Compared to other previous works, we apply not only strict unambiguous patterns but also loose unambiguous patterns to extract relationships and proposed efficient approach to refine the outputs of these patterns for the sake of high recall and high precision. The experimental result shows that the proposed method can delete most noisy pairs of terms and improve accuracy and efficiency of NL-WAS. At the same time, our method is complementary to statistically based approaches that find semantic relationships between terms.
Cognitive access policies under a primary ARQ process via chain decoding

This paper introduces a novel technique for access by a cognitive Secondary User (SU) to a spectrum with an incumbent Primary User (PU), which uses Type-I Hybrid ARQ. The technique allows the SU to perform selective retransmissions of previously corrupted SU data packets. The temporal redundancy introduced by the primary ARQ protocol and by the selective SU retransmission process can be exploited by the SU receiver to perform Interference Cancellation (IC) over the entire interference pattern, thus creating a "clean" channel for the decoding of the concurrent message. The chain decoding technique, initiated by a successful decoding operation of a SU or PU message, consists in the iterative application of IC, as previously corrupted messages become decodable. Based on this scheme, we design an optimal policy that maximizes the SU throughput under a constraint on the average long-term PU throughput degradation. We show that the optimal policy can be found by first optimizing the SU access policy using a Markov Decision Process formulation, and then applying a chain decoding protocol defined by five basic rules. Such an approach enables a compact state representation of the protocol, and its efficient numerical optimization. Finally, we show by numerical results the throughput benefit of the proposed technique.
Timing in the time domain: Cygnus X-1

Quantities characterizing temporal property, e.g., power density, coherence, and time lag, can be defined and calculated directly in the time domain without using the Fourier transformation. Spectral hardness, variability duration, and correlation between different characteristic quantities on different time scale can be studied in the time domain as well. The temporal analysis technique in the time domain is a powerful tool, particularly in studying rapid variability on short time scales (or in high frequencies). Results of studying variabilities of X-rays from Cyg X-1 with the analysis technique in the time domain and RXTE data reveal valuable clues to understanding production and propagation processes of X-rays and structure of accretion disk in the black hole system.
Teacher and TA Ratings of Preschoolers’ Externalizing Behavior

The present study investigated teachers’ and teacher aides’ (TAs) agreement in their ratings of preschoolers’ externalizing behavior and their associations with observed classroom behavior for a sample of children at risk of developing a disruptive behavior disorder. One hundred twenty-two teachers rated 360 students’ externalizing behavior in the first month of school, and within the next 6 weeks, children were observed in their classroom. Results indicated that teacher and TA reports were moderately correlated, teacher-rated severity of oppositional defiant disorder behaviors was related to agreement, and teacher/TA agreement did not predict observed externalizing behavior. In general, using teacher and TA ratings together versus a single informant’s rating did not provide a better estimate of information gathered from observational measures. Results demonstrate the importance of gathering observations and rating scales when evaluating preschoolers’ externalizing problems. Future work should explore factors that contribute to teachers’, TAs’, and observational methods’ differential evaluations of externalizing behavior.