Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tracing and its observer effect on concurrency

Execution tracing has an observer effect: the act of tracing perturbs program behaviour via its overhead, which can in turn affect the accuracy of subsequent dynamic analysis. We investigate this observer effect in the context of concurrent behaviour within JVM-based programs. Concurrent behaviour is especially fragile as task-scheduling ordering can change, which could even lead to deadlock via thread starvation under certain conditions. We analyse three dimensions of overhead, compute volume, memory volume, and uniformity, using a configurable-overhead tracer and a concurrency-performance analyser. We argue that uniformity is a key, and underappreciated, dimension of overhead that can have qualitative effects on program behaviour. Experimental results show that overhead significantly affects real-world concurrent behaviour and subsequent analysis, at times unintuitively.
Shared memory protection in a multi-tenant JVM

Multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers allow tenants to customize the application at different levels. When the customization involves tenant custom code and a single application instance is shared among multiple tenants, the issue of tenant isolation becomes critical. In common practice, tenant isolation, which amounts to protection of tenants against any interference and disturbance from each other, is performed by isolating tenant custom code in either a dedicated Virtual Machine (VM) or a dedicated container. However, tenant isolation can be enforced at the higher level of threads rather than OS processes. The main advantage of this alternative approach is that it significantly increases tenant accommodation capacity (the number of tenants that can be hosted on a single node). However, achieving this benefit raises a number of non-trivial challenges, most notably the need for access control over the memory space shared between the custom code of multiple tenants. In this paper, we present a solution for protecting the shared memory space of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) demarcated by the static fields of the java.base module. The solution is based on systematic analysis of the java.base module. As a result of the analysis, the set of shared classes is reduced to a minimal subset of the java.base module and it is shown that the static fields of the minimal subset can be protected using the Java platform security. A multi-tenant class loading mechanism is also provided for loading a tenant-specific runtime instance of classes not included in the minimal subset. The proposed solution is implemented on top of a customized OpenJDK 11 and validated by means of 18 validation scenarios. The evaluation results presented in this paper show that achieving a memory footprint reduction ranging between 32% and 97% requires only 32 CLOC in OpenJDK source and denial of only 9 distinct permissions for tenants without any significant performance overhead for a wide range of application domains.
Low-overhead multi-language dynamic taint analysis on managed runtimes through speculative optimization

Dynamic taint analysis (DTA) is a popular program analysis technique with applications to diverse fields such as software vulnerability detection and reverse engineering. It consists of marking sensitive data as tainted and tracking its propagation at runtime. While DTA has been implemented on top of many different analysis platforms, these implementations generally incur significant slowdown from taint propagation. Since a purely dynamic analysis cannot predict which instructions will operate on tainted values at runtime, programs have to be fully instrumented for taint propagation even when they never actually observe tainted values. We propose leveraging speculative optimizations to reduce slowdown on the peak performance of programs instrumented for DTA on a managed runtime capable of dynamic compilation. In this paper, we investigate how speculative optimizations can reduce the peak performance impact of taint propagation on programs executed on a managed runtime. We also explain how a managed runtime can implement DTA to be amenable to such optimizations. We implemented our ideas in TruffleTaint, a DTA platform which supports both dynamic languages like JavaScript and languages like C and C++ which are typically compiled statically. We evaluated TruffleTaint on several benchmarks from the popular Computer Language Benchmarks Game and SPECint 2017 benchmark suites. Our evaluation shows that TruffleTaint is often able to avoid slowdown entirely when programs do not operate on tainted data, and that it exhibits slowdown of on average ∼2.10x and up to ∼5.52x when they do, which is comparable to state-of-the-art taint analysis platforms optimized for performance.
Effects of second-language acquisition on character introductions in 5- and 7-year-old bilingual and monolingual children’s Frog story narratives

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to investigate specific influences. The findings revealed that monolingual and bilingual children used similar forms while introducing characters; however, for the Frog character, bilingual children used more appropriate referencing compared to monolinguals. These findings were discussed within the effects of L2 on L1 in terms of introducing characters as well as the amount of exposure to L2.
Intensive Teacher Education for an EMI Context: Facilitating the Professional Development of University Teachers

In this paper we report on an intensive professional development intervention (PDI) delivered in a UK higher education setting for university teachers from different countries. These teachers were either teaching, or preparing to teach, English Medium Instruction (EMI) courses in a range of disciplines. Few previous studies have focussed on the impact of intensive training interventions on teacher participants, particularly for interventions conducted outside teachers’ local contexts. To address this, qualitative research was conducted that explores the influence of the PDI on participant teachers’ beliefs and self-reported teaching practices in their own institutional contexts. The findings suggest that the PDI resulted in significant changes in many of the participants’ beliefs about teaching pedagogy for an EMI context. The PDI also appeared to increase teachers’ self-efficacy, and to facilitate innovation in their classroom practices. As a result, the study highlights the pedagogical elements of the PDI which emerged as being significant in bringing about these changes and discusses the implications for PDI design. Overall, the study suggests the potential role that intensive PDIs delivered outside teachers’ home and national contexts can play in facilitating teacher development.
Generalized Topp-Leone-Weibull AFT Modelling: A Bayesian Analysis with MCMC Tools using R and Stan

The generalized Topp-Leone-Weibull (GTL-W) distribution is a generalization of Weibull distribution which is obtained by using generalized Topp-Leone (GTL) distribution as a generator and considering Weibull distribution as a baseline distribution. Weibull distribution is a widely used survival model that has monotone- increasing or decreasing hazard. But it cannot accommodate bathtub shaped and unimodal shaped hazards. As a survival model, GTL-W distribution is more flexible than the Weibull distribution to accommodate different types of hazards. The present study aims at fitting GTL-W model as an accelerated failure time (AFT) model to censored survival data under Bayesian setting using R and Stan languages. The GTL-W AFT model is compared with its sub-model and the baseline model. The Bayesian model selection criteria LOOIC and WAIC are applied to select the best model.
Domestic sewage disposal in a rural family property: case study and proposition of alternative biological treatment and energy reuse

Decentralized systems applied for the collection, treatment, disposal, and reuse of wastewater are a promising alternative to deal with environmental degradation and public health problems faced in rural areas and isolated urban communities. In this context, this study carried out a technical-financial comparison between two alternatives (septic tank and a Canadian biodigester) to treat domestic sewage produced in a rural property located in the municipality of São Pedro do Turvo / SP. The experimental design of this investigation included: a study of local data, analysis of project requirements, calculations, and design in Autocad, and a comparative study of technical/economic feasibility of both systems. From a technical point of view, both alternatives are simple and easy to execute, as applied regulations are followed. The Canadian biodigester showed a lower implantation cost (R$ 911,88) when compared to the septic tank (R$ 1.314,67).
A Coupon Collector based approximation for LRU cache hits under Zipf requests

The Least Recently Used (LRU) policy is widely used in caching, since it is computationally inexpensive and can be implemented ‘on-the-fly. ’ However, existing analyses of content- wise hit-rates under LRU have expressions whose complexity grows rapidly with the buffer size. In this paper, we derive a simple yet accurate approximation for the LRU content-wise hitrates under Zipf-distributed requests, in the regime of a large content population. To this end, we map the characteristic time of a content in the LRU policy to the classical Coupon Collector’s Problem (CCP). We justify the accuracy of these approximations by showing analytically that the characteristic time concentrates sharply around its mean. Our bounds highlight and quantify the impact of cache-size scaling as well as the variations in content popularity on the accuracy of the hit-rate estimates. Specifically, we show that these estimates become more accurate with a decrease in Zipf parameter β or an increase in the cache-size scaling. Finally, our analysis of the CCP with Zipf-distributed coupons could be of independent interest.
Comparison of residual hearing preservation and auditory based performance after paediatric cochlear implantation by round window insertion versus cochleostomy technique: an ambispective cohort study

Background: Cochlear implantation (CI) has revolutionized the treatment of sensorineural deafness. The aim of the study was to compare auditory based performance in cochlear implants who underwent round window insertion and cochleostomy.Methods: Ambispective cohort study was done among the children who underwent perilingual cochlear implant in a tertiary care hospital for period of 1 year. Children who satisfied the inclusion criteria were selected and randomly subdivided into 2 groups: group A- round window insertion and group B-cochleostomy. Pre- and post-operative pure tone average (PTA) and residual hearing preserved were evaluated among the cochleostomy and round window insertion groups separately. Post-operatively, children were evaluated, from three months to 1 year from the activation of cochlear implant, with the use of scores such as Category of Auditory Performance (CAP), Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (MAIS), Speech Intelligibility rating (SIR) and Meaningful use of speech scale (MUSS score) to measure speech production skills by auditory verbal therapist. Results: A total of 80 patients were included in the study. Complete hearing preservation (within 10 dB) was significantly high in round window insertion group compared to cochleostomy technique (p<0.001). None the subjects had complete loss of residual hearing. On evaluating the post CI performance, MAIS score in the round window insertion group (9.34, 18.21, 27.79) were significantly better compared to cochleostomy group during the 3 months, 6 months and 12 months follow-up.Conclusions: Round window insertion technique is significantly more successful in complete hearing preservation at low frequencies compared to cochleostomy technique. Among the auditory scores, only MAIS in the round window insertion group was found to be significantly better compared to cochleostomy group.
Pharmacists’ strategies to detect, resolve, and prevent DRPs in CKD patients

Pharmacists have undergone obstacles in the process of detecting, resolving, and preventing CKD patients’ DRPs. Thus, optimal strategies were needed. A total of 19 articles were included based on the article searching process. Based on the articles, it can be concluded: The strategies of detecting DRPs in CKD patients were carried out through medication reconciliation and medication review. The outcomes of these strategies were the number of DRPs/patients and types of DRPs detected. Strategies to resolve and prevent DRPs in CKD patients were conducted through interprofessional collaboration, education, and counselling. The outcome of these strategies was a change in the patients’ DRPs status. Optimization of detection, resolution, and prevention strategies were performed by improving pharmacists’ professional hard and soft-skills as well as modifying the pharmaceutical care delivery model. A decrease in the number of DRPs/patients and a change in DRPs status were reported as the outcomes of optimizing this process.
Can University Connections of Independent Directors

7 The paper investigates the effect of the university connections of independent directors on firm performance by 8 choosing the panel data consisting of 2994 firm-year observations in Chinese listed manufacturing companies 9 during 2008-2013 as research sample. Empirical analysis by adopting the multiple regression analysis based on 10 OLS and the independent samples test with SPSS19.0 makes the following new finding: In manufacturing 11 companies in China, there is a positive relationship between the university connections of independent directors 12 and firm performance measured by ROE, ROA and EPS. Further investigation shows that the independent 13 directors from the universities would produce a higher productivity in the traditional labor-intensive firms rather 14 in the technology-intensive firms, and what is more, if the independent directors from the universities attend 15 more board meetings, their positive role in affecting firm performance would be enhanced. 16
Brief Overview of Intelligent Education

Intelligent Education uses AI technology as a means in the education ecology to promote the automation and intelligence of education and teaching. It reshapes the education ecology, adding AI things to the traditional education ecology that dominated by teachers and students. Although IE technology is widely used, there is little discussion about a comprehensive overview of IE. The goal and connotation of IE is discussed. Meanwhile, the emotional, ethical, AI technology as well as supervision and management perspectives in IE are discussed too. The core goal of IE is putted forward that is human-oriented and individualized development of students is. Finally, the education ecology with dual-teacher collaborative in intelligence education was proposed.
Optimization of Acoustic Communication Links for a Swarm of AUVs: The COMET and NEMOSENS Examples

Underwater acoustic communication is a key point for performance improvement in an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) swarm. The communication process is essential for improving the AUVs localization accuracy for navigation and is a convenient way for sharing information among the AUVs in a network. The objective of this work, which was developed in the COMET and NEMOSENS projects, is to address the communication process required in a mobile underwater wireless network, with a focus on the proposal of an adaptive physical layer methodology. We discuss about the employed channel access method, the frame structure, and we propose the usage of an adaptive guard interval in order to ameliorate the network usage rate. We explain the physical layer aspect of the communication: the data processing at the transmitter and receiver side. In addition to that, we propose the usage of smart communications among AUVs. We design a method for adapting some physical layer parameters. The proposed approach relies only on the knowledge of the transmission geometry, and it optimizes the number of subcarriers and the cyclic-prefix length of the Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. The obtained results show a performance improvement in terms of bit-error rate when compared with the case of random parameters selection. These results corroborate the benefits of our adaptive parameters approach.
Hybrid Architecture of oWL-ontologies for relational data Sources integration

Data integration is one of the most important tasks in the data warehousing process. The use of ontologies in the mediation process allows semantic and structural integration. In this paper, we propose a new mediation system based on an hybrid architecture of ontologies modelled according to GLAV (Generalized Local As View) model. The hybrid architecture builds a local ontology for each data source and a global ontology viewed as a mediator. The integration model defines how sources, local and global ontologies are mapped. So we propose an ascending method for building ontologies, which facilitates the semantic reconcili - ation between data sources. Moreover, we use OWL (Ontology Web Language) for defining ontologies and mappings between data sources and ontologies. User queries are expressed in our specific language which handles global ontology concepts and local ontologies properties since we assume that the user is expert in its domain. Queries are decomposed by the rewriting algorithm to obtain a set of equivalent subqueries that are sent to the corresponding sources for execution, and after that recomposed to obtain the final result.
NDT_A_254591 1483..1491

*These authors contributed equally to this work Background and Aims: Decreased serum retinoic acid (RA) levels have been shown to be linked with increased mortality in cardiovascular diseases. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between serum RA and 3-month functional outcome after ischemic stroke. Methods: Between January 2019 and September 2019, we prospectively recruited ischemic stroke patients within 24 hrs of symptom onset. Serum RA levels were measured for all patients at admission. The primary outcome was defined as poor functional outcome (modified Rankin Scale 3–6) at 90 days. The secondary outcome was defined as early neurological deterioration (END), which is considered as an increase of ≥1 point in motor power or total National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score of ≥2 points within 7 days. Results: A total of 217 patients were included in the analysis. The median RA levels were 2.9 ng/mL. Ninety-four (43.3%) and 65 (30.0%) patients experienced 3-month poor outcome and END, respectively. After adjusted for potential confounders, decreased levels of serum RAwere associated with a higher risk of poor outcome (P for trend = 0.001) and END (P for trend = 0.002). Adding RA quartile to the existing risk factors improved risk prediction for poor outcome [net reclassification improvement (NRI) = 42.6%, P = 0.001; integrated discrimination improvement (IDI) = 5.7%, P = 0.001] and END (NRI index = 45.4%, P = 0.001; IDI = 4.3%; P = 0.005). Conclusion: Low serum RA levels at baseline were associated with poor prognosis at 90 days after ischemic stroke, suggesting that RA may be a potential prognostic biomarker for ischemic stroke.
Genetic diversity of sugar palm (Arenga pinnata) derived from nine regions in Indonesia based on SSR markers

Abstract. Rinawati DY, Reflinur, Dinarti D, Sudarsono. 2021. Genetic diversity of sugar palm (Arenga pinnata) derived from nine regions in Indonesia based on SSR markers. Biodiversitas 22: 3749-3755. Sugar palm (Arenga pinnata (Wurmb) Merr. ) has an important economic and conservation value. Indonesia has genetic diversity potential of sugar palm, considering the widespread distribution of sugar palm in Indonesia which has variations in geographical type. This study aims to determine the diversity and relationship of sugar palm from nine regions in Indonesia based on SSR markers. The genetic material consists of 141 sugar palm accessions derived from Bangka, Lampung, Lebak, Bogor, Tasikmalaya, Brebes, Gowa, Bombana, and Muna. Nine pairs of SSR primers were used for genotyping. The highest and lowest genetic diversity was found in the Bangka and Muna populations, respectively. The genetic diversity within a population (79%) was higher than the genetic diversity between populations (21%). The genetic distance between Bangka and Lebak is the closest (0.033), while between Lampung and Muna is the farthest (0.283). The accession relationship is divided into three major clusters. Clusters 1 consisted of Bangka, Lampung, Bogor, Tasikmalaya, Brebes, Gowa, Bombana and Muna accessions. Cluster 2 consisted of Bangka, Lampung, Lebak, Bogor, Tasikmalaya, Brebes, and Gowa accessions. Cluster 3 consisted of Bangka, Lebak, Brebes, Tasikmalaya, and Gowa accessions. Accession clustering does not show a typical relationship pattern based on geographic location.
Modeling and the main stages of spin coating process: A review

Spin coating is a technique employed for the deposition of uniform thin films of organic materials in the range of micrometer to nanometer on flat substrates. Typically, a small amount of coating material generally as a liquid is dropped over the substrate center, which is either static or spinning at low speed. The substrate is then rotated at the desired speed and the coating material has been spread by centrifugal force. A device that is used for spin coating is termed a spin coater or just a spinner. The substrate continued to spin and the fluid spins off the boundaries of the substrate until the film is reached the required thickness. The thickness and the characteristics of coated layer (film) are depending on the number of rotations per minute (rpm) and the time of rotation. Therefore, a mathematical model is obtained to clarify the prevalent method controlling thin film fabrication. Viscosity and the concentration of (solution) spin coating material are also affecting the thickness of the substrate. This article reviews spin coating techniques including stages in the coating process such as deposition, spin-up, stable fluid outflow (spin-off), and evaporation. Additionally, the main affecting factors on the film thickness in the coating process are reviewed.
A New Multi-Step Method for Solving Delay Differential Equations using Lagrange Interpolation

This paper presents 2-step p-th order (p = 2,3,4) multi-step methods that are based on the combination of both polynomial and exponential functions for the solution of Delay Differential Equations (DDEs). Furthermore, the delay argument is approximated using the Lagrange interpolation. The local truncation errors and stability polynomials for each order are derived. The Local Grid Search Algorithm (LGSA) is used to determine the stability regions of the method. Moreover, applicability and suitability of the method have been demonstrated by some numerical examples of DDEs with constant delay, time dependent and state dependent delays. The numerical results are compared with the theoretical solution as well as the existing Rational Multi-step Method2 (RMM2).