Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Setting the Bar Low: Are Websites Complying With the Minimum Requirements of the CCPA?

Abstract On June 28, 2018, the California State Legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), arguably the most comprehensive piece of online privacy legislation in the United States. Online services covered by the CCPA are required to provide a hyperlink on their homepage with the text “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” (DNSMPI). The CCPA went into effect on January 1, 2020, a date that was chosen to give data collectors time to study the new law and bring themselves into compliance. In this study, we begin the process of investigating whether websites are complying with the CCPA by focusing on DNSMPI links. Using longitudinal data crawled from the top 1M websites in the Tranco ranking, we examine which websites are including DNSMPI links, whether the websites without DNSMPI links are out of compliance with the law, whether websites are using geofences to dynamically hide DNSMPI links from non-Californians, how DNSMPI adoption has changed over time, and how websites are choosing to present DNSMPI links (e.g., in terms of font size, color, and placement). We argue that the answers to these questions are critical for spurring enforcement actions under the law, and helping to shape future privacy laws and regulations, e.g., rule making that will soon commence around the successor to the CCPA, known as the CPRA.
Designing an Optimal Urban Community Mix for an Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage System

Aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) is a technology that makes use of the thermal capacity of soil, bedrock, and groundwater as a storage medium. It can be used for inter-seasonal storage; to store summer heat for winter use, and vice versa for winter chill. It has been used extensively in Europe and is becoming more recognized throughout North America. ATES is promising because it can store and reuse normally wasted thermal energy. ATES usually supplies a significant portion of the heating and/or cooling base-load while combustable fuels, typically natural gas, are used to supply peak loads. To maximize ATES operation, peak demand must be decreased and a flatter energy demand profile must be created. To reduce energy demand variation, an optimal building type mix should be found. Energy requirements vary significantly over time among different building types. The annual thermal energy demand profile for various building archetypes was modelled using the Energy10 and EE4 building energy simulation programs. These profiles were combined into various community mixes, and then analyzed using Genetic Algorithm optimization techniques. An optimal community building-mix resulted from the flattest collective energy demand profile. The resulting building-mix maximized large buildings and minimized small buildings. This mix reduces the need for natural gas auxiliary energy systems and their associated greenhouse gases (GHGs). It was found that applying the ATES technology to existing community mixes in the Toronto area would reduce their energy use and GHG emissions by approximately 30%; applying the mix optimization increased this number to 40%.
Förderung multi-funktionaler Vorteile von Untersaat-Gemüse-Mischanbau

The multifunctionality of living mulch systems was the underlying research question for field trials with cauliflower (Brassica oleracea L. convar. Botrytis) and leek (Allium porrum L.). Field trials were conducted at the Hessian Research Estate Frankenhausen over 3 years, parallel demonstration plots were established over 2 years on commercial pilot farms for entomological investigations in a big scale mode, plots of 1000 m². In all trials white clover (Trifolium repens L.) was used as a single species living mulch. In the years 2012 and 2013 the experimental design consisted of a 2-factorial approach for the test of 3 cultivars and the effect of additive and substitutive system for the establisment of living. The cultivars of cauliflower were Chambord F1, Belot F1, and White ball, of leek Herbstriesen Hannibal, Axima, and Catcher F1. For the substitutive system of living mulch each third row was replaced by clover with the potential of common weeding in the areas covered by vegetables. The establishment of clover took place between 4 weeks after planting or later. In 2014 a one year trial was added for the investigation of different sowing dates of living mulch, 2 and 4 weeks after planting, towards the performance of cauliflower and leek, cultivated with one cultivar. The two year pilot farm activities were located at two organic field vegetable farms in Northrhine-Westfalia, each site in one year. Crop yields were mainly influenced by the fact that the Substitutive system had a plant density which was 2/3 of the figures in control and Additive system. Therefore all figures found were significantly lower. Opposite to these findings the data referred to single crops showed an advantage for the Substitutive system. With regard to the second system tested the addition of clover into the vegetable system did not cause reductions of yields in any case. This was obvious on the levels of nutrient yields of the crops. The samples of pit fall traps were measured over a time span between August and midth of September in 2013 and midth of August till end of September in 2014. The estimates were done on a family level. The main groups were found at each site, in each crop as dominant: Carabidae >> Staphilinidae > Arachnidae. The abundance was significantly different on the species level according to Kruskal Wallis evaluations, statistical distinctions on the system could not be found due to small diffenrences and partly inconsistent results.
Acoustic wave parameter extraction with application to delay line modelling using finite element analysis

In this paper we propose a practical approach to develop a SAW parameter extraction technique and simulation method, contrary to the frequently used FEM/BEM numerical simulation technique. The new approach allows for accurate SAW device modelling through a versatile finite element method to automatically include the second order effects in the device by considering the complete set of partial differential equations. The eigenmodes and the harmonic admittance of a periodic structure obtained from the FEM simulations are used to extract the COM/P-matrix parameters based on a fitting technique that is already published in the literature. Comparison between the extracted parameters, using this technique, with currently published parameters for the same device specification was carried out and showed good agreement. As an example, a two dimensional delay line with 10 finger pairs per IDT was modelled using this approach, to outline the mechanical and electrical response of the device for variable acoustic modes and substrate thicknesses. Copyright © 2008 IFSA.
Control of slotted traffic among interconnected WDM rings by explicit reservation

A bufferless WDM ring network can provide connectivity at gigabit per second speeds on a slot-by-slot basis by means of a MAC protocol using one of the wavelengths for control. To cover large metropolitan areas, more than one rings are required. An explicit reservation approach is shown to allow directing traffic from any node of the system to the destination within a few round trip times, adapting to any traffic fluctuation.
Understanding and Improving Usability of Data Dashboards for Simplified Privacy Control of Voice Assistant Data (Extended Version)

Today, intelligent voice assistant (VA) software like Amazon's Alexa, Google's Voice Assistant (GVA) and Apple's Siri have millions of users. These VAs often collect and analyze huge user data for improving their functionality. However, this collected data may contain sensitive information (e.g., personal voice recordings) that users might not feel comfortable sharing with others and might cause significant privacy concerns. To counter such concerns, service providers like Google present their users with a personal data dashboard (called `My Activity Dashboard'), allowing them to manage all voice assistant collected data. However, a real-world GVA-data driven understanding of user perceptions and preferences regarding this data (and data dashboards) remained relatively unexplored in prior research. To that end, in this work we focused on Google Voice Assistant (GVA) users and investigated the perceptions and preferences of GVA users regarding data and dashboard while grounding them in real GVA-collected user data. Specifically, we conducted an 80-participant survey-based user study to collect both generic perceptions regarding GVA usage as well as desired privacy preferences for a stratified sample of their GVA data. We show that most participants had superficial knowledge about the type of data collected by GVA. Worryingly, we found that participants felt uncomfortable sharing a non-trivial 17.7% of GVA-collected data elements with Google. The current My Activity dashboard, although useful, did not help long-time GVA users effectively manage their data privacy. Our real-data-driven study found that showing users even one sensitive data element can significantly improve the usability of data dashboards. To that end, we built a classifier that can detect sensitive data for data dashboard recommendations with a 95% F1-score and shows 76% improvement over baseline models.
Selecting the wisdom of an expert

We study endogeneous information acquisition before communication when there is uncertainty about an expert’s bias as well as about his information. Investment in information increases credibility while communicating to a decision maker. We define the signaling and the intrinsic value of information and find the conditions under which separation in information acquisition arises. We find that a more informed expert often ends up transmitting less information. Indeed, communication is most informative with an initially uninformed expert at an intermediary information cost, while the decision maker’s preferred level of expertise, which is non monotone in cost, ensures that a separating equilibrium arises.
Sub-μrad laser beam tracking

We compare active optical elements based on different technologies to accomplish the requirements of a 2-dim. fine tracking control system. A cascaded optically and electrically addressable spatial light modulator (OASLM) based on liquid crystals (LC) is used for refractive beam steering. Spatial light modulators provide a controllable phase wedge to generate a beam deflection. Additionally, a tip/tilt mirror approach operating with piezo-electric actuators is investigated. A digital PID controller is implemented for closed-loop control. Beam tracking with a root-mean-squared accuracy of Δα=30 nrad has been laboratory-confirmed.
Supplementary Material: FATNN: Fast and Accurate Ternary Neural Networks

As a fundamental operation in convolutional neural networks, the vector inner product is one of the core components in acceleration. In this section, we first elaborate more about the “non-overflow” property and the same parallelism degree as well as their importance to the fast implementation. Then we present the detailed implementation of the proposed fast ternary inner product and introduce its application in the convolutional and fully-connected layers. Non-overflow property: If the range of input quantized vectors and the multiplication result in the inner product keeps the same, we term it “non-overflow” property. The multiplication result here, indicates the intermediate result of multiplication between the two input quantized vectors. Binary quantized values {1,−1} and ternary quantized values {1, 0,−1} are examples. We attribute the fast implementation of our FATNN to the “non-overflow” property because it enables the same parallelism degree for the multiplication (i.e., xnor) and accumulation (i.e., popcount) operations. Specifically, for the BNNs case, 8 full-precision values can be packed into one byte. When xnor is employed for the multiplication, the parallelism degree is 8. Moreover, popcount also accumulates 8 data at the same time (same parallelism degree with the xnor operation). For the TNNs case, only 4 full-precision values can be packed into one byte. Thus, the parallelism degree of our TM(·) in Eq. (3) is 4. Interestingly, the popcount operation can also accumulate the 4 data simultaneously. However, if standard 2-bit quantization values {0, 1, 2, 3} are leveraged, the multiplication by combination of bit-wise operators (such as xnor) can own the parallelism degree of 4 if packed in byte. However, 4 bits are required to encode the multiplication result. Thus, the parallelism degree for the accumulation procedure is 2 at most (less than 4). Consequently, the computational efficiency will be halved. Based on the analysis, it can be learnt that the “non-overflow” property is an important attribute to enable the fast implementation of ternary and binary networks. As explained in the Section 3, we design a fast implementation for TNNs by exploiting the “non-overflow” propAlgorithm 1: Fast Ternary Inner Product Input: (1): Full-precision weight vector w ∈ R and activation vector a ∈ R . (2): Pre-allocated temporary buffer ŵ and â with unsigned char type in the length of N/4. (3): Quantization parameters α 1 , α w 2 and α a 1 , α a 2 which are used to parameterize the step sizes for weights and activations, respectively. Output: The ternary inner product result z. 1 Step (1): data packing; 2 for i← 0 to N−1 4 do 3 Pack 4 values of a[4i : 4i+ 3] into one unsigned char and store it in â[i]; 4 Pack 4 values of w[4i : 4i+ 3] into one unsigned char and store it in ŵ[i]; 5 end 6 Step (2): ternary inner product; 7 acc = 0; 8 for i← 0 to N−1 4 do 9 acc += popcount(TM(ŵ[i], â[i])); 10 end 11 z = acc−N
EF-based strategies for productivity improvements at wet-etch stations

Abstract In complex manufacturing environments, Cycle Time (CT) reductions obtained at critical production steps could generate considerable productivity improvements and lead to capacity increases at no investment costs. A wet-etch station operating in a real semiconductor manufacturing plant has been modelled to investigate the impact of different assignment strategies on CT performance. Assignment strategies based on the “Earliest Finish” (EF) concept have been developed and their productivity efficiency compared with a workload balance-based strategy. The EF-based strategies differ from each other for both computational complexity and amount of real-time information required. Encouraging results obtained for a high detail level EF strategy have inspired the development of conceptually similar strategies characterised by reduced implementation efforts. Fundamental implementation constraints, suggested by the manufacturing engineers familiar with the wet-etch station, have been taken into account throughout the different stages of this study. CT reductions ranging between 11% and 28% could be achieved at the modelled wet-etch station.
Supplementary Material of LSG-GPD: Coherent Point Drift with Local Surface Geometry for Point Cloud Registration

Detailed derivations and experiment settings are provided in this supplementary material. In Sec. 1, the derivation of the EM algorithm is presented. In Sec. 2, we show the derivation of the outlier weight. In Sec. 3, concepts and definitions about Lie groups and Lie algebra are briefly reviewed. Then, the derivation of the gradient and the Hessian matrix are discussed. The update of the covariance multiplier σ 2 is also derived in this section. In Sec. 4, detailed experiment settings are given. Finally, in Sec. 5, we provide a visualization of the point-to-plane penalization coefficient α on a point cloud data and more insights on the robustness of the method. The source code is available at https: //github.com/ChirikjianLab/LSG-CPD.git .
A digital precedent library for classical period Ottoman mosques

We have developed a digital environment and a method for the analysis, structuring and presentation of architectural information on classical period Ottoman mosques designed and engineered by the great architect Sinan. This environment and method is targeted at architects and architecture students, architectural historians, scholars, and public interested in classical period Ottoman mosque architecture. The research aims at developing a taxonomy for the classification of the components and aspects describing this architecture and its era, to be used and extended by the target group. Another research goal is to implement a flexible and extensible environment that utilises this taxonomy for the analysis and presentation of this body of architecture. The environment enables the creation and navigation of relationships between information entities enabling associative browsing and creative discoveries. This environment is designed to be accessible online, and can be extended to become an online knowledge centre for classical period Ottoman mosques.
Influence of interconnections onto the breakdown voltage of planar high-voltage p-n junctions

The influence of a high-voltage interconnection onto the blocking capability of a resurf diode is determined by solving the 2-D Poisson equation. By adding a metal interconnection which crosses the space-charge region, the breakdown voltage is reduced, depending on the distance between the interconnection and the semiconductor surface. If the distance is 5 mu m, the breakdown voltage is decreased 38%, but if the distance is as low as 3 mu m, the breakdown voltage is decreased by 54%. To compensate for the effect of the interconnection two different methods are discussed. By optimizing the doping concentration of the p/sup -/layer in front of the p-n junction the influence of the interconnection can be reduced to 18% and 37%, respectively. The second method uses floating metal rings positioned in the oxide film between the semiconductor and the interconnection. If the rings are optimally positioned, the influence of the interconnection can be reduced from 54% to only 16%. It is shown that a variation of the lateral gap between the metal rings influences the shielding effectiveness. >
S-SEED operation with noise: bit error rate analysis

The static and dynamic noise characteristics of a symmetric self electrooptic effect device (S-SEED) are studied. The mechanism for bit errors is identified, and the bit error rate related to the decision threshold, input contrast ratio, nominal input power, and bit activation period. Dynamic simulations use practical S-SEED parameters for the diode capacitance, bias voltage, and responsivity values to show specific examples; however, the bit error rate curves provide general results since these parameters are allowed to be variables. The probability of abnormal operation, when there is distortion or an error in the output, is also derived and can be directly related to the bit error rate. In a practical S-SEED switching environment example, we show that the noise effect results in a probability of abnormal operation to be less than 10/sup -50/ provided the bit activation period exceeds the switching time by 0.5%. >
Correlation Factors and a Predictive Model of Serum Ceruloplasmin Normalized Wilson’s Disease

Background: The false increase of ceruloplasmin (Cp) in some Wilson’s disease (WD) patients, which overlaps with those in non-WD liver disease patients, decrease the diagnostic accuracy. The aims of our study was to understand the factors affecting WD patients’ Cp normalization, and develop a model using routine predictors to identify WD patients with ambiguous serum Cp.Results: The mixed effects model analysis which executed in longitudinal study revealed that the WD patients’ Cp normalization were significantly associated with the copper burden and liver function indexes, like urinary copper treated with dimercaptopropansulfonate sodium (P=0.000), aspartate aminotransferase (P=0.011), γ-glutamyltransferase (P=0.000), albumin (P=0.000). Multivariate logistic regression analysis in case-control study showed age (P=0.000) and serum creatine (P=0.000) were independent risk factors associated with WD. Based on their regression coefficients, a simplified WD index was derived: 0.001 × age [yr] × Creatine [umol/L]. The AUC value of WD index in total cohort were 0.923 (P=0.000). At a WD index cutoff value of ≤ 1.9 and ≤ 2.5, the positive and negtive predictive value are 88.2% and 89.9% for WD, respectively.Conclusions: The increase of serum Cp in WD patients is related to their excessive copper burden and hepatic injury, common tests can effectively foretell those WD patients with nearly normal serum Cp from other liver injury patients.
Peak Area Consistency Evaluation in Gamma Spectrometry

Quantification of radionuclide activities in gamma spectrometry can be a challenging task. It depends on efficiency calibration, peak area calculation, nuclide decay data and correction factors, such as attenuation correction or true coincidence summing corrections. These quantities can present significant challenges to an accurate analysis. It is therefore desirable to have a way of assessing the quality of the radionuclide quantification that can be applied to samples with unknown activities and radionuclide compositions. A verification of the self-consistency of the analysis is one possible way of accomplishing this. In gamma spectrometry it is possible to calculate radionuclide activities using information from multiple gamma emission energies. This leads to an overdetermined system for which the solution can be used to look for inconsistencies. By calculating the recovered peak areas from the radionuclide activities and comparing these to the measured peak areas, outliers can be identified and by resolving these inconsistencies the analysis of the spectrum can be improved. This peak area consistency evaluation can be used to find incorrect shape of the efficiency calibration, missing interferences in the nuclide decay data, and point to peaks where the peak area calculation needs to be optimized. The performance of the method has been shown on a simple spectrum consisting of three radionuclides that are interfering with each other as well as a complex spectrum with unknown radionuclide composition and activities. The method will be integrated into a future version the Genie 2000 Gamma Spectroscopy Software.
Influence of hypoxia on biochemical aspects and on expression of genes related to oxygen-homeostasis of the Amazonian cichlid Astronotus ocellatus (Agassiz, 1831)

Abstract Variations in dissolved oxygen levels are common in the Amazonian aquatic environments and the aquatic organisms that inhabit these environments developed a variety of adaptive responses to deal with such conditions. Some Amazonian fish species are tolerant to low oxygen levels and the cichlid Astronotus ocellatus is one of the most hypoxia-tolerant species. Herein, we aimed to unveil the biochemical and molecular responses that A. ocellatus presents when submitted to hypoxia. Hypoxia indicators were measured, such as plasma glucose, plasma lactate, hepatic glycogen and relative transcript levels of prolyl hydroxylase 2 (phd2) and hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (hif-1α) in juveniles of approximately 50 g exposed to 1, 3, and 5 hours of hypoxia (0.7 mg O2.L-1), followed by 3 hours of recovery in normoxia (6 mg O2.L-1). Fish exposed to hypoxia reduced liver glycogen levels within 3 hours of hypoxia, when comparing with 1 hour, and increased plasma glucose and lactate. Under the same condition, phd2 transcripts levels increased in gills, but decreased in liver. In contrast, hypoxia did not affect relative gene expression of hif-1α in both tissues. Based on the transcription pattern of phd2, these results showed that liver and gills of A. ocellatus have different molecular strategies to cope with environmental hypoxia.