Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Loss-tolerant real-time content integrity validation for P2P video streaming

The use of peer-to-peer (P2P) mechanisms for content delivery is attractive to content and service providers alike. P2P data transfers offload the demand on servers and reduce the bandwidth requirements, with corresponding benefits of improved scalability and performance. This, however, poses interesting challenges in ensuring content integrity. Peers may be malicious and attempt to send corrupt and/or inappropriate content to disrupt the service. Consequently, service providers must provide clients with the capability to validate the integrity of content delivered from peers. This goal is particularly challenging in the context of streaming video because the content needs to be validated in real time. A practical solution must provide high integrity assurance while incurring low communication and computation overhead. In this paper, we present a packet-based validation approach for ensuring the integrity of data obtained from peers. Our proposed scheme randomly selects packets and validates their correctness. Through detailed experiments, we show that this mechanism is not only lightweight but is also able to detect content corruption with very high probability, thus protecting the viewing experience and the provider's content delivery service.
The Mankiw-romer-weil Growth Model and the Valuation of Human Capital. ¤

This note examines the measure of human capital implicit in Mankiw, Romer and Weil's 1992 paper on 'A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth'. It is argued that MRW's methodology fails to take account of crosscountry di¤erences in the costs of acquiring human capital, and so implies an excessive di¤erence in human capital between advanced countries and developing countries, where acquiring human capital is cheaper. The implication of this is that the equation which they successfully …t to crosscountry data is not, in fact, consistent with the Solow constant returns to scale growth model, but implies increasing returns to scale and, on plausible factor share assumptions, is in fact similar in its main properties to some endogenous growth models, having constant returns to substitution. The author thanks various people at University of Warwick for invaluable comments and suggestions. Any errors are my own.
Evolutionary Cell Biology of Division Mode in the Bacterial Planctomycetes-Verrucomicrobia- Chlamydiae Superphylum

Bacteria from the Planctomycetes, Verrucomicrobia, and Chlamydiae (PVC) superphylum are exceptions to the otherwise dominant mode of division by binary fission, which is based on the interaction between the FtsZ protein and the peptidoglycan (PG) biosynthesis machinery. Some PVC bacteria are deprived of the FtsZ protein and were also thought to lack PG. How these bacteria divide is still one of the major mysteries of microbiology. The presence of PG has recently been revealed in Planctomycetes and Chlamydiae, and proteins related to PG synthesis have been shown to be implicated in the division process in Chlamydiae, providing important insights into PVC mechanisms of division. Here, we review the historical lack of observation of PG in PVC bacteria, its recent detection in two phyla and its involvement in chlamydial cell division. Based on the detection of PG-related proteins in PVC proteomes, we consider the possible evolution of the diverse division mechanisms in these bacteria. We conclude by summarizing what is known and what remains to be understood about the evolutionary cell biology of PVC division modes.
A non-destructive technique using 3D X-ray Computed Tomography to reveal semiconductor internal physical defects

This paper focuses on the application of 3D X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) to precisely detect and confirm semiconductor internal physical defects without the need to decapsulate the sample. Equipped with advanced technologies and innovations, today's X-ray machine is capable of reconstructing the two-dimension (2D) sliced images to form 3D images and videos in much shorter time. With the introduction of 3D X-ray CT designed for electronics field, failure mechanisms once only visible after destructive analysis can now be revealed in non-destructive way. The technique not only saves cost, it shortens the turnaround time tremendously and allows customer's response and relevant improvement actions to be taken more efficiently.
Experimental and Theoretical Results Tree Decomposition for Large-Scale SVM Problems :

To handle problems created by large data sets, we propose a method that uses a decision tree to decompose a data space and trains SVMs on the decomposed regions. Although there are other means of decomposing a data space, we show that the decision tree has several merits for large-scale SVM training. First, it can classify some data points by its own means, thereby reducing the cost of SVM training applied to the remaining data points. Second, it is efficient for seeking the parameter values that maximize the validation accuracy, which helps maintain good test accuracy. Third, we can provide a generalization error bound for the classifier derived by the tree decomposition method. For experiment data sets whose size can be handled by current non-linear, or kernel-based SVM training techniques, the proposed method can speed up the training by a factor of thousands, and still achieve comparable test accuracy.
Local State Space Analysis Leads to Better Partial Order Reduction

This paper presents an approach to more efficient partial order reduction for explicit model checking of concurrent systems. This approach utilizes a compositional reachability analysis to generate overapproximate local state transition models for all components in a concurrent system where a dependence relation and other useful information can be extracted. The extracted dependence relation, compared to what can be obtained by statically analyzing the system descriptions, is more precise and refined, and therefore leads to more efficient partial order reduction. This approach is demonstrated on a set of concurrent system examples. Significantly higher reduction in state space has been observed in the majority of the examples compared to what can be obtained with SPIN.
Alleviation of High-Fat Diet-Induced Fatty Liver Damage in Group IVA Phospholipase A2-Knockout Mice

Hepatic fat deposition with hepatocellular damage, a feature of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, is mediated by several putative factors including prostaglandins. In the present study, we examined whether group IVA phospholipase A2 (IVA-PLA2), which catalyzes the first step in prostanoid biosynthesis, is involved in the development of fatty liver, using IVA-PLA2-knockout mice. Male wild-type mice on high-fat diets (20% fat and 1.25% cholesterol) developed hepatocellular vacuolation and liver hypertrophy with an increase in the serum levels of liver damage marker aminotransferases when compared with wild-type mice fed normal diets. These high-fat diet-induced alterations were markedly decreased in IVA-PLA2-knockout mice. Hepatic triacylglycerol content was lower in IVA-PLA2-knockout mice than in wild-type mice under normal dietary conditions. Although high-fat diets increased hepatic triacylglycerol content in both genotypes, the degree was lower in IVA-PLA2-knockout mice than in wild-type mice. Under the high-fat dietary conditions, IVA-PLA2-knockout mice had lower epididymal fat pad weight and smaller adipocytes than wild-type mice. The serum level of prostaglandin E2, which has a fat storage effect, was lower in IVA-PLA2-knockout mice than in wild-type mice, irrespective of the kind of diet. In both genotypes, high-fat diets increased serum leptin levels equally between the two groups, but did not affect the serum levels of adiponectin, resistin, free fatty acid, triacylglycerol, glucose, or insulin. Our findings suggest that a deficiency of IVA-PLA2 alleviates fatty liver damage caused by high-fat diets, probably because of the lower generation of IVA-PLA2 metabolites, such as prostaglandin E2. IVA-PLA2 could be a promising therapeutic target for obesity-related diseases including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Phasic Activation of Monkey Locus Ceruleus Neurons by Simple Decisions in a Forced-Choice Task

The noradrenergic locus ceruleus (LC) system has been implicated in several behavioral functions, most notably, response to salient sensory events. Here, we provide new evidence indicating a role in the execution of responses associated with simple decisions. We examined impulse activity of monkey LC neurons during performance of a forced-choice discrimination task. The timing of LC activity more closely tracked behavioral responses than stimulus presentation. LC neurons were phasically activated preceding behavioral responses for both correct and incorrect identifications but were not activated by stimuli that failed to elicit lever responses nor by nontask-related lever movements. We hypothesize that the LC responds to the outcome of task-related decision processes, facilitating their influence on overt behavior. This role of the LC in regulating the behavioral outcome of decisional processes contrasts with more traditional views of LC responses as primarily related to sensory processes.
Interconvertibility of Set Constraints and Context-free Language Reachability 1

We show the interconvertibility of context-free-language reachability problems and a class of set-constraint problems: given a context-free-language reachability problem, we show how to construct a set-constraint problem whose answer gives a solution to the reachability problem; given a set-constraint problem, we show how to construct a context-free-language reachability problem whose answer gives a solution to the set-constraint problem. The interconvertibil-ity of these two formalisms ooers an conceptual advantage akin to the advantage gained from the interconvertibility of nite-state automata and regular expressions in formal language theory, namely, a problem can be formulated in whichever formalism is most natural. It also ooers some insight into the \O(n 3) bottleneck" for diierent types of program-analysis problems, and allows results previously obtained for context-free-language reachability problems to be applied to set-constraint problems.
Simple routing strategies for adversarial systems

In this paper we consider the problem of delivering dynamically changing input streams in dynamically changing networks where both the topology and the input streams can change in an unpredictable way. In particular, we present two simple distributed balancing algorithms (one for packet injections and one for flow injections) and show that for the case of a single receiver these algorithms will always ensure that the number of packets or flow in the system is bounded at any time step, even for an injection process that completely saturates the capacities of the available edges and even if the network topology changes in a completely unpredictable way. We also show that the maximum number of packets or flow that can be in the system at any time is essentially best possible by providing a lower bound that holds for any online algorithm, whether distributed or not. Interestingly, our balancing algorithms do not behave well in a completely adversarial setting. We show that also in the other extreme of a static network and a static injection pattern the algorithms will converge to a point in which they achieve an average routing time that is close to the best possible average routing time that can be achieved by any strategy. This demonstrates that there are simple algorithms that can be efficient for very different scenarios.
Blind Source Separation and Deconvolution of Fast Sampled Signals

In real world implementations of blind source separation and deconvolution, the mixing takes place in continuous time. In the models normally considered, discrete time sampling is implicitly assumed to provide a mixing filter matrix from a suitable demixing filter matrix which can be learned given an appropriate algorithm. In this paper, we consider the implications of trying to separate and deconvo lve signals which may include some signals which are low frequency compared to the sample rate. It is shown that if a fast sampling rate is u sed to obtain the discrete time observed data, learning to solve bl ind source separation and deconvolution tasks can be very difficult. Th is is due to the data covariance matrix becoming almost singular. We propose a discrete time model based on alternative discrete time operators which is capable of overcoming the problems and giving significant ly improved performance under the conditions described.
Spatial-Temporal Correlation Properties of the 3GPP Spatial Channel Model and the Kronecker MIMO Channel Model

The performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is greatly influenced by the spatial-temporal correlation properties of the underlying MIMO channels. This paper investigates the spatial-temporal correlation characteristics of the spatial channel model (SCM) in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the Kronecker-based stochastic model (KBSM) at three levels, namely, the cluster level, link level, and system level. The KBSM has both the spatial separability and spatial-temporal separability at all the three levels. The spatial-temporal separability is observed for the SCM only at the system level, but not at the cluster and link levels. The SCM shows the spatial separability at the link and system levels, but not at the cluster level since its spatial correlation is related to the joint distribution of the angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD). The KBSM with the Gaussian-shaped power azimuth spectrum (PAS) is found to fit best the 3GPP SCM in terms of the spatial correlations. Despite its simplicity and analytical tractability, the KBSM is restricted to model only the average spatial-temporal behavior of MIMO channels. The SCM provides more insights of the variations of different MIMO channel realizations, but the implementation complexity is relatively high.
Dimensions of Earnings Inequality in Australia

Over the last three decades, Australia and many other industrialised nations have seen major social and economic changes. For Australia, two of these have been increasing inequality of earnings and the growth in alternative forms of employment arrangements. For the US and a number of other countries, the prevailing explanation for the increase in inequality centres on the notion of skill-biased technological change (SBTC). This view is based on the consensus that technical change favours more skilled workers, as new technologies evolve and are introduced into workplaces. This explanation relates the increases in earnings inequalities to a shift in demand towards highly skilled workers and away from less skilled workers, and centres around the concept and measure of skill. In this context, this thesis investigates three central issues that relate to dimensions of inequality in the Australian labour market. First, has there in fact been increasing skill bias in the demand for labour, and how should skill best be measured in addressing this issue? Second, if increasing skill bias is confirmed, is there any evidence that this increase in relative demand for high skill labour is an important explanatory factor in the rise in earnings inequality? Third, can the increasing role of casual and part-time work in Australia be interpreted as, in substantial part, a response to skill bias in the demand for labour, and as indicative of rising inequality in the labour market? The main findings of the thesis are as follows. For the first question, there is evidence of skill-bias in the demand for labour both in the long and short term in total and full-time employment. Although there was clear evidence of skill bias in full-time employment for men and women, the extent was not homogenous across different job types. Secondly, earnings inequality continued to increase in occupations for men and women between 1989-1995 and 1997-2002, irrespective of the type of inequality measures employed. Moreover, in trying to explain the causes of increasing earnings inequality in full-time work, the analysis found that the O*NET measures of skill and knowledge provided some tentative evidence that supports the skill bias hypothesis in Australia. Thirdly, in the exploration of the relationship between skill bias, alternative job types and earnings inequality, the thesis finds some indicative evidence to suggest that the process of job type creation may imply a new dimension of increasing earnings inequality in the Australian labour market. The broad implications of these findings are tied to both increasing earnings inequality in full-time earnings and in household income inequality. This is particularly so for those households whose majority of members are low skilled and are dependent on casual and part-time work, and who on average work a small number of hours.
Improving Cache Power and Performance Using Deterministic Naps and Early Miss Detection

Cache memory systems consume a significant portion of static and dynamic power consumption in processors. Similarly, the access latency through the cache memory system significantly impacts the overall processor performance. Several techniques have been proposed to tackle the individual power or performance. However, almost all trade off performance for power or vice versa. We propose a novel scheme that improves performance while reducing both static and dynamic power with minimal area overhead. Our proposed scheme reduces dynamic power by using a hash-based mechanism to minimize the number of cache lines read during program execution. This is achieved by identifying and not reading those that are guaranteed non-matches (i.e., cache misses) to a new access. Performance improvement occurs when all cache lines of a referenced set are determined non-matches to the requested address, and therefore skip a few cache pipe stages as guaranteed misses. Static power savings is achieved by exploiting in-flight cache access information to deterministically lower the power state of cache lines that are guaranteed not to be accessed in the immediate future. These techniques easily integrate into existing cache architectures and were evaluated using widely known CAD tools and benchmarks. We have observed up to 92, 17, and 2 percent improvements in performance, static, and dynamic power, respectively, with less than 3 percent area overhead.
IWT-interactive watershed transform: a hierarchical method for efficient interactive and automated segmentation of multidimensional gray-scale images

In this paper we present the Interactive Watershed Transform (IWT) for efficient segmentation of multidimensional grayscale images. The IWT builds upon a fast immersion-based watershed transform (WT) followed by a hierarchical organization of the resulting basins in a tree structure. Each local image minimum is represented as an atomic basin at the lowest hierarchy level. The fast WT consists of two steps. First, all image elements are sorted according to their image intensity using a Bucket Sort algorithm. Second, each element is processed exactly once with respect to its neighborhood (e. g., 4, 6, and 8 direct neighbors for 2d, 3d, and 4d transform, respectively) in the specified order. Sort-ing, processing, and tree generation are of order O(n). After computing the WT, one global parameter, the so-called preflooding height, and an arbitrary number of markers are evaluated in real-time to control tree partitioning and basin merging. The IWT has been successfully applied to a large variety of medical images, e. g. , for segmentation and volu-metry of neuroanatomic structures as well as bone segmentation, without making assumptions on the objects’ shapes. The IWT combines automation and efficient interactive control in a coherent algorithm while completely avoiding oversegmentation which is the major problem of the classical WT.
A Model of Individual Coping with Information Technology Challenges to Identity

Drawing on ideas from identity control theory and coping theory and on a diverse range of social psychology literature, we propose an integrative theoretical framework that unpacks and traces the processes by which information technology comes to affect users’ identity. We define four types of strategies (acting on the situation, adjusting the self, catharsis and distancing) through which people cope with technological challenges to the self. We suggest that these strategies may lead to four individual-level outcomes, namely reinforced identity, redefined identity, ambivalent identity and antiidentity. The model is provided with a preliminary support through reference to real life situations, carefully selected from extant empirical IS enquiries.
Influence of Negative-Pressure Wound Therapy on Tissue Oxygenation of the Foot

Background Negative-pressure wound therapy (NPWT) is believed to accelerate wound healing by altering wound microvascular blood flow. Although many studies using laser Doppler have found that NPWT increases perfusion, recent work using other modalities has demonstrated that perfusion is reduced. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of NPWT on tissue oxygenation of the foot, which is the most sensitive region of the body to ischemia. Methods Transcutaneous partial pressure of oxygen (TcpO2) was used to determine perfusion beneath NPWT dressings of 10 healthy feet. The sensor was placed on the tarso-metatarsal area of the foot and the NPWT dressing was placed above the sensor. TcpO2 was measured until it reached a steady plateau state. The readings obtained at the suction-on period were compared with the initial baseline (pre-suction) readings. Results TcpO2 decreased significantly immediately after applying NPWT, but gradually increased over time until reaching a steady plateau state. The decrease in TcpO2 from baseline to the steady state was 2.9 to 13.9 mm Hg (mean, 9.3±3.6 mm Hg; 13.5±5.8%; P<0.01). All feet reached a plateau within 20 to 65 minutes after suction was applied. Conclusions NPWT significantly decrease tissue oxygenation of the foot by 2.9 to 13.9 mm Hg. NPWT should be used with caution on feet that do not have adequate tissue oxygenation for wound healing.
The Ezafe as a head-marking inflectional affix: Evidence from Persian and Kurmanji Kurdish

This paper suggests a new analysis of the Persian Ezafe as a suffix attaching to the head and to some of its intermediate projections, and marking them as awaiting a modifier or a complement. Viewed as such, the Ezafe construction is an illustration of the head-marked pattern of morphological marking of grammatical relations (Nichols 1986). This view of the Ezafe is quite the opposite of the Case-marker analysis suggested by Samiian (1994) and Larson and Yamakido (2005), according to which the Ezafe is rather a dependent marking device. The analysis outlined in this paper entails that the Ezafe particle, whose origins in Modern Persian can be traced back to the Old Persian relative/demonstrative hya/tya (Darmesteter 1883), has undergone a process of reanalysis- grammaticalization, being thus reinterpreted as a part of the nominal inflection. It is further shown that although a comparable process might have taken place in some other West Iranians languages, Kurmanji Kurdish dialects for instance, grammaticalization has not proceeded in the same way and at the same rate, resulting in a more complex picture for the different uses of the Ezafe.