Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Efficient Zero Current Switching Control for L-Based DC–DC Converters in TEG Applications

This brief presents an improved zero current switching (ZCS) control for a high-gain inductor-based dc–dc converter targeting thermoelectric generator for wearable electronics. The proposed ZCS control is an all-digital circuit that utilizes a simple finite state machine and a 3-bit counter to locate the zero current point. In addition, an efficient push–pull circuit along with delay capacitance banks is used to tune the delay near the zero current point to reduce the estimated error. The proposed control circuit achieves 56 delay steps using 3 control bits while having a high resolution, which helps in maintaining the efficiency of the converter. The prototype chip is fabricated in 65-nm CMOS and occupies an area of less than 0.04 mm <sup>2</sup>. The measured results of the converter confirm 81% peak efficiency at 55- <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu\text{W}$</tex-math></inline-formula> output power and 50-mV input voltage.
Make Crypto Safe Again ! Detecting Bugs in API Usage Using Bounded Model Checking

The codebases of many popular cryptographic libraries are the result of decades of development and incremental changes. OpenSSL for example, arguably the most important crypto library available today, has been around since 1998 [6]. As a result, the libraries’ application programming interfaces (APIs) have been continuously adapted and changed, often increasing their complexity and making them harder to use correctly. Correct API usage is especially important in the context of information security, because neglecting even minor details can lead to a complete break of the security the protocol is intended to provide (cf. [2]). With OpenSSL, mistakes such as ignoring a single return statement have been observed to be able to lead to a complete breach in confidentiality [3]. A recent line of academic work has applied model checking techniques to discover API misuse (cf. [3, 8]). In this context, the goal of this project is to evaluate the feasibility of using Bounded Model Checking techniques (in particular, the Bounded Model Checker CBMC [1]) to validate correct API usage. For this, we will develop property monitors that allow to check that programs follow a correct sequence of API calls. The remainder of this report is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the necessary background on the validation of SSL certificates. Section 3 explains how we can use property monitors in combination with a Bounded Model Checker such as CBMC to validate correct API usage, and Section 4 shows the concrete validation we perform for OpenSSL. Section 5 presents some examples of applying our property models and discusses the limitations of this approach. Finally, Section 6 concludes the report.
Mali in Self-reported physical activity among health care professionals in South-West Nigeria

Introduction: Physical activity (PA) is a key requirement for maintaining good health. There is growing evidence of declining PA worldwide. Physical inactivity is linked with the global obesity pandemic and increasing burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in developing countries. A barrier to PA counseling by health care providers (HCPs) is personal PA habits. Information regarding PA among HCPs in Nigeria is limited. We aimed to determine the adequacy and predictors of PA among HCPs of a tertiary health care facility in Lagos, Nigeria. Methods: A cross‐sectional study was carried out with the International Physical Activity Questionnaire‐Short Form (IPAQ‐SF). Using the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, PA was categorized as adequate or inadequate. Predictors of PA were explored with multivariate logistic regression. Results: A total of 300 HCPs were recruited, comprising 47.7% doctors and dentists, 43.3% nurses and 9.0% other HCPs. Mean age was 39.9 (9.0 years), 79.2%, 9.7% and 11.1% of the HCPs had low, moderate or high PA levels respectively. Thus, only 20.8% had adequate PA. 71.3% had body mass index (BMI) above the recommended value. BMI of ≥ 25 kg/m2 was associated with inadequate PA (Adjusted Odds Ratio‐2.1, P = 0.018). Conclusion: Majority of the HCPs had inadequate PA levels according to WHO guidelines. BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2 was associated with inadequate physical inactivity. The low level of PA implies that these HCPs are at risk for NCDs. This will have a negative impact on availability of human resource for health. There is an urgent need to establish programs to increase PA among HCPs.
A new scoring system for predicting survival in patients with non-small cell lung cancer

This analysis was performed to create a scoring system to estimate the survival of patients with non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Data from 1274 NSCLC patients were analyzed to create and validate a scoring system. Univariate (UV) and multivariate (MV) Cox models were used to evaluate the prognostic importance of each baseline factor. Prognostic factors that were significant on both UV and MV analyses were used to develop the score. These included quality of life, age, performance status, primary tumor diameter, nodal status, distant metastases, and smoking cessation. The score for each factor was determined by dividing the 5‐year survival rate (%) by 10 and summing these scores to form a total score. MV models and the score were validated using bootstrapping with 1000 iterations from the original samples. The score for each prognostic factor ranged from 1 to 7 points with higher scores reflective of better survival. Total scores (sum of the scores from each independent prognostic factor) of 32–37 correlated with a 5‐year survival of 8.3% (95% CI = 0–17.1%), 38–43 correlated with a 5‐year survival of 20% (95% CI = 13–27%), 44–47 correlated with a 5‐year survival of 48.3% (95% CI = 41.5–55.2%), 48–49 correlated to a 5‐year survival of 72.1% (95% CI = 65.6–78.6%), and 50–52 correlated to a 5‐year survival of 84.7% (95% CI = 79.6–89.8%). The bootstrap method confirmed the reliability of the score. Prognostic factors significantly associated with survival on both UV and MV analyses were used to construct a valid scoring system that can be used to predict survival of NSCLC patients. Optimally, this score could be used when counseling patients, and designing future trials.
Processing and 3D printing of Gradient Heterogeneous Bio-Model Based on Computer Tomography Images

A kind of digitally designing and manufacturing system for the gradient heterogeneous 3-D printing was designed. The molar model of PLY format was composed based on the CT images, and a novel method for the gradient heterogeneous material model designing based on the material distribution control function and the sliced edge rings was proposed. The point color slicing algorithm based on the topological structure was achieved. Based on the system, a gradient heterogeneous dental model was prepared. The algorithm used for constructing and slicing of the molar model could store the geometry and material information effectively, and maintain the compatibility for the heterogeneous 3-D printer. The system supplied a fast and integrating method for the heterogeneous 3-D bio-model printing.
Regular Paper Toward Collaborative Defense Across Organizations

New attack methods, such as new malware and exploits are released every day. Attack information is essential to improve defense mechanisms. However, we can identify barriers against attack information sharing. One barrier is that most targeted organizations do not want to disclose the attack and incident information because they fear negative public relations caused by disclosing incident information. Another barrier is that attack and incident information include confidential information. To address this problem, we propose a confidentiality-preserving collaborative defense architecture that analyzes incident information without disclosing confidential information of the attacked organizations. To avoid disclosure of confidential information, the key features of the proposed architecture are (1) exchange of trained classifiers, e.g., neural networks, that represent abstract information rather than raw attack/incident information and (2) classifier aggregation via ensemble learning to build an accurate classifier using the information of the collaborative organizations. We implement and evaluate an initial prototype of the proposed architecture. The results indicate that the malware classification accuracy improved from 90.4% to 92.2% by aggregating five organization classifiers. We conclude that the proposed architecture is feasible and demonstrates practical performance. We expect that the proposed architecture will facilitate an effective and collaborative response to current attack-defense situations.
Winter 12-6-2018 Model-based reinforcement learning : A survey

Reinforcement learning is an important branch of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Compared with traditional reinforcement learning, model-based reinforcement learning obtains the action of the next state by the model that has been learned, and then optimizes the policy, which greatly improves data efficiency. Based on the present status of research on model-based reinforcement learning at home and abroad, this paper comprehensively reviews the key techniques of model-based reinforcement learning, summarizes the characteristics, advantages and defects of each technology, and analyzes the application of model-based reinforcement learning in games, robotics and brain science.
Cost minimization while satisfying hard/soft timing constraints for heterogeneous embedded systems

In high-level synthesis for real-time embedded systems using heterogeneous functional units (FUs), it is critical to select the best FU type for each task. However, some tasks may not have fixed execution times. This article models each varied execution time as a probabilistic random variable and solves heterogeneous assignment with probability (HAP) problem. The solution of the HAP problem assigns a proper FU type to each task such that the total cost is minimized while the timing constraint is satisfied with a guaranteed confidence probability. The solutions to the HAP problem are useful for both hard real-time and soft real-time systems. Optimal algorithms are proposed to find the optimal solutions for the HAP problem when the input is a tree or a simple path. Two other algorithms, one is optimal and the other is near-optimal heuristic, are proposed to solve the general problem. The experiments show that our algorithms can effectively reduce the total cost while satisfying timing constraints with guaranteed confidence probabilities. For example, our algorithms achieve an average reduction of 33.0% on total cost with 0.90 confidence probability satisfying timing constraints compared with the previous work using worst-case scenario.
The Architecture of Metabolism. Inventing a Culture of Resilience

The Metabolist movement, with its radical and visionary urban and architectural schemes, drew the attention of an international architecture community to Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Seen from a contemporary perspective, the movement’s foremost concern was cultural resilience as a notion of national identity. Metabolism responded to the human and environmental catastrophe that followed the atomic bombing of Japan and vulnerability to natural disasters such as earthquakes, with architecture envisioning the complete transformation of Japan as a system of political, social, and physical structures into resilient spatial and organizational patterns adaptable to change. Projecting a utopia of resilience, Metabolism employed biological metaphors and recalled technoscientific images which, together with the vernacular, evoked the notion of a genetic architecture able to be recreated again and again. A specific concern was to mediate between an urbanism of large, technical and institutional infrastructures and the freedom of the individual. My aim is to critically examine the notion of sustainable architecture by rereading Metabolist theories and products, such as terms, models, projects, and buildings. For a better understanding of the present discourse, this text searches for a possible history of sustainable architecture, a subject mostly presented ahistorically.
Sources of Success for Boosted Wrapper Induction

In this paper, we examine an important recent rule-based information extraction (IE) technique named Boosted Wrapper Induction (BWI) by conducting experiments on a wider variety of tasks than previously studied, including tasks using several collections of natural text documents. We investigate systematically how each algorithmic component of BWI, in particular boosting, contributes to its success. We show that the benefit of boosting arises from the ability to reweight examples to learn specific rules (resulting in high precision) combined with the ability to continue learning rules after all positive examples have been covered (resulting in high recall). As a quantitative indicator of the regularity of an extraction task, we propose a new measure that we call the SWI ratio. We show that this measure is a good predictor of IE success and a useful tool for analyzing IE tasks. Based on these results, we analyze the strengths and limitations of BWI. Specifically, we explain limitations in the information made available, and in the representations used. We also investigate the consequences of the fact that confidence values returned during extraction are not true probabilities. Next, we investigate the benefits of including grammatical and semantic information for natural text documents, as well as parse tree and attribute-value information for XML and HTML documents. We show experimentally that incorporating even limited grammatical information can increase the regularity of natural text extraction tasks, resulting in improved performance. We conclude with proposals for enriching the representational power of BWI and other IE methods to exploit these and other types of regularities.
Cardiovascular Mortality and Long-Term Exposure to Particulate Air Pollution: Epidemiological Evidence of General Pathophysiological Pathways of Disease

Background—Epidemiologic studies have linked long-term exposure to fine particulate matter air pollution (PM) to broad cause-of-death mortality. Associations with specific cardiopulmonary diseases might be useful in exploring potential mechanistic pathways linking exposure and mortality. Methods and Results—General pathophysiological pathways linking long-term PM exposure with mortality and expected patterns of PM mortality with specific causes of death were proposed a priori. Vital status, risk factor, and cause-of-death data, collected by the American Cancer Society as part of the Cancer Prevention II study, were linked with air pollution data from United States metropolitan areas. Cox Proportional Hazard regression models were used to estimate PM-mortality associations with specific causes of death. Long-term PM exposures were most strongly associated with mortality attributable to ischemic heart disease, dysrhythmias, heart failure, and cardiac arrest. For these cardiovascular causes of death, a 10-&mgr;g/m3 elevation in fine PM was associated with 8% to 18% increases in mortality risk, with comparable or larger risks being observed for smokers relative to nonsmokers. Mortality attributable to respiratory disease had relatively weak associations. Conclusions—Fine particulate air pollution is a risk factor for cause-specific cardiovascular disease mortality via mechanisms that likely include pulmonary and systemic inflammation, accelerated atherosclerosis, and altered cardiac autonomic function. Although smoking is a much larger risk factor for cardiovascular disease mortality, exposure to fine PM imposes additional effects that seem to be at least additive to if not synergistic with smoking.
The contribution of Philip W. Bell to accounting thought

SYNOPSIS: This paper reviews the contribution of the late Philip Bell to accounting thought. He is best known for his joint work with Edgar O. Edwards, The Theory and Measurement of Business Income. This seminal work is put in context by exploring Bell’s earlier work as an economist and his later work, in which he developed applications and extensions of the Edwards and Bell model. Many of his concerns are relevant to the policy and research issues of today.
Human immunodeficiency virus 1 Nef protein downmodulates the ligands of the activating receptor NKG 2 D and inhibits natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity

Received 11 April 2006 Accepted 2 September 2006 Natural killer (NK) cells are a major component of the host innate immune defence against various pathogens. Several viruses, including Human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1), have developed strategies to evade the NK-cell response. This study was designed to evaluate whether HIV-1 could interfere with the expression of NK cell-activating ligands, specifically the human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-I-like MICA and ULBP molecules that bind NKG2D, an activating receptor expressed by all NK cells. Results show that the HIV-1 Nef protein downmodulates cell-surface expression of MICA, ULBP1 and ULBP2, with a stronger effect on the latter molecule. The activity on MICA and ULBP2 is well conserved in Nef protein variants derived from HIV-1-infected patients. In HIV-1-infected cells, cell-surface expression of NKG2D ligands increased to a higher extent with a Nef-deficient virus compared with wild-type virus. Mutational analysis of Nef showed that NKG2D ligand downmodulation has structural requirements that differ from those of other reported Nef activities, including HLA-I downmodulation. Finally, data demonstrate that Nef expression has functional consequences on NK-cell recognition, causing a decreased susceptibility to NK cell-mediated lysis. These findings provide a novel insight into the mechanisms evolved by HIV-1 to escape from the NK-cell response.
Examining the effects of a firm's perception of key stakeholder's business mindsets and degree of shared value creation focus on its competitive repertoire

Competitive repertoire research, despite all its progress, lacks a research model that can extend the field’s reach to address today’s environment. Key stakeholder business mindsets and the shared value creation focus are both organizational and economic forces that might explain that there are more concepts which influence the competitive repertoire of a firm. My research model will apply these forces to go in-depth on the currently four most important concepts of competitive repertoire, these are: strategic simplicity, repertoire inertia, nonconformity and competitive aggressiveness. It will explain what for impact these forces will have on these concepts to see if these concepts are still applicable for competitive repertoire. This thesis contains three parts which are based on an in-depth analyses on the aspects of the key stakeholder business mindsets , the shared value creation focus and the four concepts of competitive repertoire. Than the thesis will apply these aspects into the research model and explain if these four concepts are still applicable for firm. The result shows that these forces call for new and different concepts for competitive repertoire, because these forces are mostly negatively related to these four concepts of competitive repertoire. They explain that these concepts are outdated if a firm uses these forces to reach a firm’s optimal performance.
Estimates of winter currents on the Israeli continental shelf

A simplified analytical model for continental shelf wind-driven currents is adopted. The calculated results compare favorably with extensive field measurements from two separate sources. The model is used to hindcast the current climatology on the Israeli continental shelf. The maximum northward/southward alongshore currents at 10-m water depth, with a return period of 100 years, are found to be 1.28 and 0.53 m/s, respectively. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Evaluation of the Cost Efficiency of the Beibu Gulf Port based on Super Efficiency DEA

To study Chinese Beibu Gulf port’s cost efficiency based on the cost evaluation index system, which is selecting net value of fixed assets, net assets, cost of prime operating, the number of employees as input indicators, and selecting prime operating revenue as well as net profit as the output indicators, we constructed a mode to evaluate the DEA’ port company’s cost-efficiency. The study found that the comprehensive efficiency of Beibu Gulf port DEA is effective compared with other 15 listed coastal port companies. It has large space in efficiency, longitudinally compared with Yantian port, Nanjing port, Xiamen port, Lianyungang port and Tangshan port, the top five port cities. Keywords-Cost Efficiency; Beibu Gulf Port; Super Efficiency; DEA; Evaluation
Offshoring and the Shifting Skill Composition of the It Workforce Draft – Please Do Not Quote or Circulate

We use new offshoring data and new workforce microdata with occupational classifications to investigate how an increase in the global supply of IT workers has affected the occupational composition of the US IT workforce. Our estimates s uggest that when firms open offshore captive centers for IT employment, domestic IT empl oyment skews towards occupations requiring more “personal” inputs, such as network a dministration, project management, or sales, and away from jobs such as computer programm ing in which work output can be easily transferred over computer networks. At firms with o ffshore captive centers, the fraction of domestic workers employed in occupations requiring l ttle personal input fell by over 8% during the last decade, although mean employment le vels for these occupations was steady in firms that were not offshoring. We discuss implicat ions for workers, policy makers, educators, and managers.
Southern ( SAIS ) 3-1-2010 Web-based Disease Management : A Design Science Approach to Chronic Disease Management

This research-in-progress presents a difficult healthcare problem, namely how to reduce the costs associated with chronic diseases. A comprehensive Web-based disease management system is proposed as a potential solution to help patients with chronic disease more effectively self-manage their disorders. A proposed research agenda is presented using a design science research approach. Theories capable of informing the design of the proposed solution are discussed including social learning theory and the theory of planned behavior. Design parameters are described and potential design ideas are presented.