Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Willingness to Pay and Public Acceptance for Hydrogen Buses: A Case Study of Perugia

Sustainability transportation is characterized by a positive externality on the environment, health, social security, land use and social inclusion. The increasing interest in global warming has caused attention to be paid to the introduction of the hydrogen bus (H2B). When introducing new environmental technologies, such as H2B, it is often necessary to assess the environmental benefits related to this new technology. However, such benefits are typically non-priced due to their public good nature. Therefore, we have to address this problem using the contingent valuation (CV) method. This method has been developed within environmental economics as a means to economically assess environmental changes, which are typically not traded in the market. So far, several big cities have been analyzed to evaluate the perceived benefit related to H2B introduction, but to the best of our knowledge, no one has performed a CV analysis of a historical city where smog also damages historical buildings. This paper presents the results obtained using a multi-wave survey. We have investigated user preferences to elicit their willingness to pay for H2B introduction in Perugia, taking into account all types of negative externalities due to the traffic pollution. The results confirm that residents in Perugia are willing to pay extra to support the introduction of H2B.
Proteomic Changes of Tissue-Tolerable Plasma Treated Airway Epithelial Cells and Their Relation to Wound Healing

Background. The worldwide increasing number of patients suffering from nonhealing wounds requires the development of new safe strategies for wound repair. Recent studies suggest the possibility of nonthermal (cold) plasma application for the acceleration of wound closure. Methods. An in vitro wound healing model with upper airway S9 epithelial cells was established to determine the macroscopically optimal dosage of tissue-tolerable plasma (TTP) for wound regeneration, while a 2D-difference gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE) approach was used to quantify the proteomic changes in a hypothesis-free manner and to evaluate the balance of beneficial and adverse effects due to TTP application. Results. Plasma doses from 30 s up to 360 s were tested in relation to wound closure after 24 h, 48 h, 72 h, 96 h, and 120 h, in which lower doses (30, 60, and 120 s) resulted in dose-dependent improved wound healing rate compared to untreated cells. Thereby, the 120 s dose caused significantly the best wound healing properties after 96 and 120 h. The proteome analysis combined with IPA revealed that a lot of affected stress adaptation responses are linked to oxidative stress response emphasizing oxidative stress as a possible key event in the regeneration process of epithelial cells as well as in the adaptation to plasma exposure. Further cellular and molecular functions like proliferation and apoptosis were significantly up- or downregulated by all TTP treatments but mostly by the 120 s dose. Conclusions. For the first time, we were able to show plasma effects on cellular adaptation of upper airway epithelial S9 cells improving wound healing. This is of particular interest for plasma application, for example, in the surgery field of otorhinolaryngology or internal medicine.
Cooperatively managing dynamic writeback and insertion policies in a last-level DRAM cache

Stacked-DRAM used as the last-level caches(LLC) in multi-core systems delivers performance enhancement due to its capacity benefit. While the performance of LLC depends heavily upon its block replacement policy, conventional replacement policy needs redesigning to exploit the best of DRAM cache while avoiding its drawbacks. Existing DRAM cache insertion policy blindly forwards victim lines to the off-chip memory, regardless of the potential for increased hits by placing a fraction of them in the DRAM cache; nevertheless, a näıve design that steers all dirty victims to the DRAM cache introduces excessive writeback traffic which aggravates capacity misses and DRAM interference. To leverage insertions in terms of writeback or fill requests, we propose a cooperative writeback and insertion policy that adapts to the distinct access patterns of heterogeneous applications based on runtime misses and writeback efficiency, thereby increasing HMIPC (harmonic instruction per cycle) throughput by 22.2%, 13.7% and 14.5% compared to LRU and two static writeback policies.
First in a Little Iberian Village ” versus ” Second in Rome ” : A Wine-Based Test for Collective Reputation

How do individuals or things through their own reputation (e.g. researchers, football players, scientific articles, wine producers.) give birth to a group’s reputation and conversely how do they take advantage of this group’s reputation (resp. a laboratory, a football team, an academic journal, a vineyard.) ? To be a leader in a rather unknown organization or to be a follower in a well-known organization : what is better ? A long time ago, Julius Caesar declared that he ”would rather be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome”. This article aims at testing the accuracy of this famous quotation and more generally intends to analyse the complex relationship existing between the two dimensions of reputation : individual and collective. The theoretical model —a static simultaneous equation system— is econometrically estimated from a dataset concerning no less than 124,000 wine quality opinions by about 6,000 different European consumers. These opinions concern the main wines currently supplied in 7 different countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, United-Kingdom). The results are in line with Julius Caesar’s intuition.
Lateralization of the Human Mirror Neuron System

A cortical network consisting of the inferior frontal, rostral inferior parietal, and posterior superior temporal cortices has been implicated in representing actions in the primate brain and is critical to imitation in humans. This neural circuitry may be an evolutionary precursor of neural systems associated with language. However, language is predominantly lateralized to the left hemisphere, whereas the degree of lateralization of the imitation circuitry in humans is unclear. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of imitation of finger movements with lateralized stimuli and responses. During imitation, activity in the inferior frontal and rostral inferior parietal cortex, although fairly bilateral, was stronger in the hemisphere ipsilateral to the visual stimulus and response hand. This ipsilateral pattern is at variance with the typical contralateral activity of primary visual and motor areas. Reliably increased signal in the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) was observed for both left-sided and right-sided imitation tasks, although subthreshold activity was also observed in the left STS. Overall, the data indicate that visual and motor components of the human mirror system are not left-lateralized. The left hemisphere superiority for language, then, must be have been favored by other types of language precursors, perhaps auditory or multimodal action representations.
A characterization of sharing in parallel programs and its application to coherency protocol evaluation

Trace-driven simulation is used to analyze the memory reference patterns of write-shared data in several parallel applications. A characterization of write sharing is developed (based on the notion of a write run), and the traces are examined using metrics derived from the characterization. The results indicate that the amount of write sharing in all programs is small, and that it is characterized by short-to-medium sequences of per-processor references, with little contention for either data or locks. A simple model of write sharing is developed from the write run characterization. By applying the results of the sharing analysis to the model, weighted by machine-specific cycle costs for carrying out coherency-related bus-operations, relative protocol performance can be estimated. These results are compared to those from detailed architectural simulations. <<ETX>>
Flagellar tip activation stimulated by membrane adhesions in Chlamydomonas gametes

Membrane adhesions between the flagella of mating-type "plus" and "minus" gametes of Chlamydomonas reinhardi are shown to stimulate a rapid change in the ultrastructure of the flagellar tips, designated as flagellar tip activation (FTA). A dense substance, termed fibrous tip material (FTM), accumulates between the flagellar membrane and the nine single A microtubules of the tip. The A microtubules then elongate, growing into the distal region of the tip, increasing tip length by 30%. This study describes FTA kinetics during normal and mutant matings, presents experiments designed to probe its role in the mating reaction, and offers the following conclusions: (a) FTA is elicited by agents that cross-link flagellar membrane components (including natural sexual agglutinins, antiflagellar antisera, and concanavalin A) but not by flagellar adherence to polylysine-coated films. (b) FTA is reversed by flagellar disadhesion. (c) Gametes can undergo repeated cycles of FTA during successive rounds of adhesion/disadhesion. (d) FTA, flagellar tipping, and sexual signaling are simultaneously blocked by colchicine and by vinblastine, suggesting that tubulinlike molecules, perhaps exposed at the membrane surface, are involved in all three responses. (e) FTA is not blocked by short exposure to chymotrypsin, by cytochalasins B and D, nor by concanavalin A, even though all block cell fusion; the response is therefore autonomous and experimentally dissociable from later stages in the mating reaction. (f) Under no experimental conditions is mating-structure activation observed to occur unless FTA also occurs. This study concludes that FTA is a necessary event in the sexual signaling sequence, and presents a testable working model for its mechanism.
Iterative Decomposition of Water and Fat with Echo Asymmetry and Least-Squares Estimation (IDEAL) Magnetic Resonance Imaging as a Biomarker for Symptomatic Multiple Myeloma

Introduction To evaluate the effectiveness of iterative decomposition of water and fat with echo asymmetry and least-squares estimation (IDEAL) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to discriminate between symptomatic and asymptomatic myeloma in lumbar bone marrow without visible focal lesions. Materials and Methods The lumbar spine was examined with 3-T MRI in 11 patients with asymptomatic myeloma and 24 patients with symptomatic myeloma. The fat-signal fraction was calculated from the ratio of the signal intensity in the fat image divided by the signal intensity of the corresponding ROI in the in-phase IDEAL image. The t test was used to compare the asymptomatic and symptomatic groups. ROC curves were constructed to determine the ability of variables to discriminate between symptomatic and asymptomatic myeloma. Results Univariate analysis showed that β2-microglobulin and bone marrow plasma cell percent (BMPC%) were significantly higher and fat-signal fraction was significantly lower with symptomatic myeloma than with asymptomatic myeloma. Areas under the curve were 0.847 for β2;-microglobulin, 0.834 for fat-signal fraction, and 0.759 for BMPC%. Conclusion The fat-signal fraction as a biomarker for multiple myeloma enables discrimination of symptomatic myeloma from asymptomatic myeloma. The fat-signal fraction offers superior sensitivity and specificity to BMPC% of biopsy specimens.
Using Massive Atomic Write Operations in GPU Applications

Many parallel applications involve simultaneous write updates to shared memory objects. To ensure program correctness, developers need to impose an ordering among different shared memory write updates. One design choice is to use private data objects for individual threads and subsequently apply sophisticated algorithms to merge write results with implicit barriers. Another design choice is to simply use hardware atomics so that write updates to shared data objects are guaranteed to happen in a particular order without introducing data races. The first method has been a widely adopted choice, since atomic write operations are more expensive than non-atomic write updates. Moreover, native atomic writes may serialize computation tasks when multiple threads update the same memory location within a short time period. Therefore, native atomic writes are mostly used in scenarios such as synchronization and concurrency control. However, due to the explosive growth of parallelism in both software (threads) and hardware (cores), designing applications with absolutely no write collisions and only implicit synchronization barriers has become an extremely challenging task in terms of the complexity of algorithms and the growing memory space requirement for private data objects. We are facing programming challenges and we need to address several open questions. The first one is whether we should consider applying more native atomic writes for shared memory data updates in order to alleviate the algorithm complexity and memory requirement problem. Is there any potential for improving program efficiency with smartly scheduled native atomic write updates? If so, how many atomic writes should be allowed, to ensure both efficiency and coding productivity? In this work, we conducted a systematic exploration to address these questions. Despite the traditional perception that we should avoid large numbers of atomic writes, using massive atomic writes and scheduling them appropriately is in fact a simple and yet effective approach for programming many-core GPUs. The key is to detect collisions, scatter the conflicted writes into different time intervals, and reduce the computation serialization. We propose two basic schemes in this paper: one is parallel reduction based and the other is data/computation re-scattering based. We have found that not only irregular parallel applications that are hard to implement without explicit synchronization or atomic operations can benefit from these techniques, but also traditional regular applications such as sparse matrix vector multiplications can be improved significantly using these techniques. We have implemented fast and lightweight parallel collision detection and reduction techniques, and achieved up to a 1.69 times speedup for a set of representative scientific computation kernels.
Collective Practices in Common Information Spaces: Insight From Two Case Studies

This research explores the design of practice toolkits as components, distinct from community management systems, allowing members of a virtual community to engage in the practice the community is about. Our analysis is informed by two case studies in different application domains each presenting alternative but complementary insights to the design of computer-mediated practice toolkits. The first case study describes how established practices in music performance are encapsulated in a suitably augmented music notation toolkit so as to support the learning objectives of virtual teams engaged in music master classes. The second case study presents experience with the development of a toolkit for engaging in the practice of vacation package assembly. This time the virtual team is a cross-organization virtual community of practice whose members streamline their efforts by internalizing and performing in accordance to a new (virtual) practice. Findings from the two studies reveal two distinct orientations in the design of practice toolkits. Specifically, in application domains where practices are well established (i.e., music performance), the toolkit serves as the medium for reconstructing an existing practice in virtual settings. In contrast, when cross-organization collaboration is involved (i.e., vacation package assembly), the toolkit should be designed so as to encapsulate a “meta”-practice, exhibiting both boundary and locality.
Compositional software synthesis of communicating processes

We describe a new compositional software synthesis method for synthesizing concurrent software programs into ordinary C programs so that they can be executed on embedded processors without the need for a run-time multitasking operating system. The synthesized C program can be readily retargeted to different processors using available optimizing C compilers. The method works by transforming the initial input specification into a set of interacting Petri net components. It then applies a quasi-static scheduling method on each Petri net component to produce a corresponding state machine model. The resulting set of interacting state machines are then mapped into a single C program, which can finally be compiled to native machine code via conventional C compilers. In the degenerate case, each process in the initial input specification is mapped into a separate Petri net component. In this case, the size of the resulting C program is directly proportional to the size of the original concurrent specification. Thus, this technique can scale well to large applications and is immune to code explosion.
Calcium-Activated SK Channels Influence Voltage-Gated Ion Channels to Determine the Precision of Firing in Globus Pallidus Neurons

Globus pallidus (GP) neurons fire rhythmically in the absence of synaptic input, suggesting that they may encode their inputs as changes in the phase of their rhythmic firing. Action potential afterhyperpolarization (AHP) enhances precision of firing by ensuring that the ion channels recover from inactivation by the same amount on each cycle. Voltage-clamp experiments in slices showed that the longest component of the GP neuron's AHP is blocked by apamin, a selective antagonist of calcium-activated SK channels. Application of 100 nm apamin also disrupted the precision of firing in perforated-patch and cell-attached recordings. SK channel blockade caused a small depolarization in spike threshold and made it more variable, but there was no reduction in the maximal rate of rise during an action potential. Thus, the firing irregularity was not caused solely by a reduction in voltage-gated Na+ channel availability. Subthreshold voltage ramps triggered a large outward current that was sensitive to the initial holding potential and had properties similar to the A-type K+ current in GP neurons. In numerical simulations, the availability of both Na+ and A-type K+ channels during autonomous firing were reduced when SK channels were removed, and a nearly equal reduction in Na+ and K+ subthreshold-activated ion channel availability produced a large decrease in the neuron's slope conductance near threshold. This change made the neuron more sensitive to intrinsically generated noise. In vivo, this change would also enhance the sensitivity of GP neurons to small synaptic inputs.
CARTOGRAFIA SOCIAL UMA FERRAMENTA PARA A CONSTRUÇÃO DO CONHECIMENTO TERRITORIAL: REFLEXÕES TEÓRICAS ACERCA DAS POSSIBILIDADES DE DESENVOLVIMENTO DO MAPEAMENTO PARTICIPATIVO EM PESQUISAS QUALITATIVAS

A Cartografia Social atualmente é vista como uma nova ferramenta utilizada no planejamento e na transformação social, sendo fundamentada na investigação-ação-participativa e desenvolvimento local. Os grupos sociais são os autores dos mapas, todo o processo de representação e construção de conhecimentos territoriais e feito em coletividade. Este artigo objetiva apresentar um conjunto de reflexões teórico metodológicas acerca das possibilidades de organizar mapeamentos participativos. No que concerne aos procedimentos metodológicos o referencial teórico foi fundamentado nos estudos de Gorayeb; Meireles (2014), Gorayeb; Meireles; Silva (2015), Acselrad; Coli, (2008), entre outros. A Cartografia Social apresenta-se como uma ferramenta muito importante na medida em que favorece articulação entre saberes e conhecimentos por meio do estabelecimento de uma linguagem acessível que diz respeito a representação da realidade por meio da cartografia.
An overview of multi-resolution image processing techniques from the perspective of content-based image retrieval

In recent years, the young and expanding research community of granular computing has begun to show interest in image processing, specifically in the area of image retrieval from image databases or the Web. It might therefore be beneficial to provide a background to researchers in granular computing, at a reasonable depth, of the techniques employed in image retrieval, particularly in the case of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). This article focuses on multi-resolution image processing techniques that are commonly used in CBIR, and, in my opinion, that are potentially of interest to researchers in the area of granular computing. Given the restrictions on the length of a paper, I am unable to sufficiently address all of the important techniques in this article. Instead, I emphasize several classical techniques, and suggest several references for further reading.
FPMR: MapReduce Framework on FPGA A Case Study of RankBoost Acceleration

learning and data mining are gaining increasing attentions of the computing society. FPGA provides a highly parallel, low power, and flexible hardware platform for this domain, while the difficulty of programming FPGA greatly limits its prevalence. MapReduce is a parallel programming framework that could easily utilize inherent parallelism in algorithms. In this paper, we describe FPMR, a MapReduce framework on FPGA, which provides programming abstraction, hardware architecture, and basic building blocks to developers. An on-chip processor scheduler is implemented to maximize the utilization of computation resources and achieve better load balancing. An efficient data access scheme is carefully designed to maximize data reuse and throughput. Meanwhile, the FPMR framework hides the task control, synchronization, and communication away from designers so that more attention can be paid to the application itself. A case study of RankBoost acceleration based on FPMR demonstrates that FPMR efficiently helps with the development productivity; and the speedup is 31.8x versus CPU-based implementation. This performance is comparable to a fully manually designed version, which achieves 33.5x speedup. Two other applications: SVM, PageRank are also discussed to show the generalization of the framework.
Design of All-pass Digital Filters Using Second-Order Cone Programming

This paper presents a new method for designing an all-pass (AP) digital filter such that its phase response fits a given desired phase response in the minimax error sense. The AP filter design utilizes a new optimization method called second-order cone programming (SOCP) to find the optimal AP filter coefficients. As compared with the existing linear programming (LP) design, the SOCP-based design yields a more accurate fitting. An example is given to illustrate the performance of the SOCP-based AP filter design approach.
Framework for Pairwise key establishment in wireless sensor networks

This paper deals primarily on analysis of establishing Pairwise keys on Distributed Sensor Networks [1]. Pairwise key establishment is a fundamental security service in sensor networks; it enables sensor nodes to communicate securely with each other using cryptographic techniques. In order to facilitate the study of new key distribution techniques, we develop a general framework for pairwise key establishment based on the polynomial based key predistribution and then develop Grid based Key distribution which has number of attractive properties. First, it guarantees that any two sensors can establish a pairwise key when there are no compromised sensors, provided that the sensors can communicate with each other. Second, this scheme is resilient to node compromise.