Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast simulation of turbo codes over Rayleigh fading channels

In this paper we apply importance sampling (IS) for efficient performance evaluation of turbo codes over Rayleigh fading channels. Our approach is based on the most probable error path (MPEP) method which shifts the input probability density function (pdf) to the mode of the optimal biased distribution where most probable errors are located. In particular, we show how to bias the pdf of the AWGN process in order to maximize the computational efficiency gain. It is demonstrated that the proposed method requires much smaller sample sizes to achieve the same accuracy required by a conventional MC estimator.
The Generator and Parity-Check Matrices of Turbo Codes

Turbo codes are typically represented as parallel concatenated convolutional codes, but will be treated as serially concatenated codes in this paper. Treating turbo codes as serially concatenated codes makes possible the general description of their generator and parity-check matrices. Given the generator and parity-check matrices, turbo codes may be analyzed from a block and low-density parity-check code point of view.
The effect of macromolecular crowding on mobility of biomolecules, association kinetics, and gene expression in living cells

We discuss a quantitative influence of macromolecular crowding on biological processes: motion, bimolecular reactions, and gene expression in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. We present scaling laws relating diffusion coefficient of an object moving in a cytoplasm of cells to a size of this object and degree of crowding. Such description leads to the notion of the length scale dependent viscosity characteristic for all living cells. We present an application of the length-scale dependent viscosity model to the description of motion in the cytoplasm of both eukaryotic and prokaryotic living cells. We compare the model with all recent data on diffusion of nanoscopic objects in HeLa, and E. coli cells. Additionally a description of the mobility of molecules in cell nucleus is presented. Finally we discuss the influence of crowding on the bimolecular association rates and gene expression in living cells.
Yet Another Autoconf Proposal (YAAP) for Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks

This paper addresses the issues of automatic address and prefix configuration of MANET routers. Specifically, the paper analyzes the differences between “classic IP networks” and MANETs, emphasizing the interface, link, topology, and addressing assumptions present in “classic IP networks”. The paper presents a model for how this can be matched to the specific constraints and conditions of a MANET – i.e., how MANETs can be configured to adhere to the Internet addressing architecture. This sets the stage for development of a MANET autoconfiguration protocol, enabling automatic configuration of MANET interfaces and prefix delegation. This autoconfiguration protocol is characterized by (i) adhering strictly to the Internet addressing architecture, (ii) being able to configure both MANET interface addresses and handle prefix delegation, and (iii) being able to configure both stand-alone MANETs, as well as MANETs connected to an infrastructure providing, e.g., globally scoped addresses/prefixes for use within the MANET. The protocol is specified through timed automatons which, by way of model checking, enable verification of certain protocol properties. Furthermore, a performance study of the basic protocol, as well as of various optimization and extensions hereto, is conducted based on network simulations.
3 + 1 Dissipative Space out of Quantum Mechanics

We report the discovery of two dual and emergent sets of three irreversible bi-vectors dubbed the TauQuernions τi, τj, τk that are otherwise isomorphic to quaternions. This inherently dissipative 3-dimensional tauquernion space is a subspace of the geometric (Cli ord) algebra G4,0 with generators {a, b, c, d} ; a straightforward mapping produces a 3+1 dimensional sub-space with signature (+ − −−) in G5,0. The individual tauquernions are entanglement operators corresponding to the quantum mechanical Bell and Magic operators. The form τi + τj + τk has 64 sign variants of which 16 are nilpotent, which latter we identify with the Higgs boson; the other 48 variants square to the unitary 4-vector ±abcd, which we identify as the carrier of mass. A natural candidate for dark matter also emerges, which we analyze. We calculate the information content of these and related forms, draw an exact map of the entropic pathways an expansion will follow, and sketch how this Bit Bang develops. Photons are clearly represented and transparently intertwined in the space, so one can expect overall compatibility with relativity theory.
Learning Belief Networks for Language Understanding

This paper is about learning Belief Networks (BNs) for spoken language understanding. The BNs are used to infer the communicative goal of a user's information-seeking query in a restricted domain. We assume that a restricted domain generally has a finite number of communicative goals. The problem is formulated as N binary classifications (one per goal), and each is performed by a BN. This formulation allows for the identification of queries with multiple goals, as well as queries with out-ofdomain goals. The BN topologies are automatically learnt according to the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We aim to learn the least complex topologies that can best model the available data set. These enhanced topologies are compared with a pre-defined, basic topology. Experiments with the ATIS-3 corpus shows that the enhanced topology improves goal identification accuracies from 83.7% to 91.5% when a single output goal is evaluated, and from 66.0% to 83.1% when multiple output goals are evaluated.
Performance evaluation of the priority resolution scheme in PLC networks

Power Line Communications standards, such as Homeplug and IEEE 1901, aim to provide strict channel access prioritisation in CSMA/CA mode. This is achieved by making lower-priority access categories postpone contention when packets belonging to categories with higher priority are pending for transmission. For this purpose, specific slots in which stations advertise the priority of the current packets to be transmitted are allocated. However, they are only present after the occurrence of successful frame exchanges. Thus, in lightly loaded conditions as well as after channel errors or collisions, the priority resolution mechanism is not employed. In this work, we evaluate the implications of these features on the QoS experienced by each access category. Results show the network provides a complex performance behaviour caused by the interdependence of higher-priority traffic contention and lower-priority traffic preemption.
Suicide after deliberate self-harm: a 4-year cohort study.

OBJECTIVE The purposes of this study were to estimate suicide rates up to 4 years after a deliberate self-harm episode, to investigate time-period effects on the suicide rate over the follow-up period, and to examine potential sociodemographic and clinical predictors of suicide within this cohort. METHOD This prospective cohort study included 7,968 deliberate self-harm attendees at the emergency departments of four hospital trusts in the neighboring cities of Manchester and Salford, in northwest England, between September 1, 1997, and August 31, 2001. Suicide rates and standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) for the cohort were calculated. Potential risk factors were investigated by using Cox's proportional hazards models. RESULTS Sixty suicides occurred in the cohort during the follow-up period. An approximately 30-fold increase in risk of suicide, compared with the general population, was observed for the whole cohort. The SMR was substantially higher for female patients than for male patients. Suicide rates were highest within the first 6 months after the index self-harm episode. The independent predictors of subsequent suicide were avoiding discovery at the time of self-harm, not living with a close relative, previous psychiatric treatment, self-mutilation, alcohol misuse, and physical health problems. CONCLUSIONS The results highlight the importance in a suicide prevention strategy of early intervention after an episode of self-harm. Treatment should include attention to physical illness, alcohol problems, and living circumstances. Self-harm appears to confer a particularly high risk of suicide in female patients.
HomeMaestro: Order from Chaos in Home Networks

We present HomeMaestro, a distributed system for monitoring and instrumentation of home networks. HomeMaestro performs extensive measurements at the host level to infer application network requirements, and identifies networkrelated problems through time-series analysis. By sharing and correlating information across hosts in the home network, our system automatically detects and resolves contention over network resources among applications based on predefined policies. Finally, HomeMaestro implements a distributed virtual queue to enforce those policies by prioritizing applications without additional assistance from network equipment such as routers or access points.
Trust-Propagation Based Authentication Protocol in Multihop Wireless Home Networks

In this paper, we propose an authentication and secure channel establishment protocol that is reliable and adaptable for multihop wireless home networks. The main idea is that a home server hands over its authenticating capability to some already authenticated devices to enable these devices to be able to authenticate other devices which cannot reach the home server directly due to their physical location and radio power constraints. Key to our design is a neighbor device authentication protocol, based on pre-user-injected network password, with minimal reliance on public key cryptographic operation. In addition, our protocol supports a secure channel establishment among heterogeneous devices after authentication. Through the evaluation, we show that our protocol is resistant to various attacks
Search Dynamics in Consumer Choice under Time Pressure: An Eye-Tracking Study

We study decisions that involve choosing between different numbers of options under time pressure using eye-tracking to monitor the search process of the subjects. We find that subjects are quite adept at optimizing within the set of items that they see, that the initial search process is random in value, that subjects use a stopping rule to terminate the search process that combines features of optimal search and satisficing, and that subjects search more often in certain focal regions of the display, which leads to choice biases. (JEL C91, D12, M31)
Clinical and Angiographic Follow-Up of Stent-Only Therapy for Acute Intracranial Vertebrobasilar Dissecting Aneurysms

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Little has been known about the clinical and angiographic follow-up results of stent-only therapy for intracranial vertebrobasilar dissecting aneurysms (VBDA). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility, safety, clinical, and angiographic follow-up of stent-only therapy for VBDA. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-seven patients with 29 VBDAs (11 ruptured, 18 unruptured), not suitable for deconstructive treatment, underwent stent-only therapy. Feasibility, safety, clinical, and angiographic follow-up were retrospectively evaluated. Angiographic outcomes were compared between single-stent and multiple-stent groups. RESULTS: All attempted stent placements were successfully accomplished without any treatment-related complication. Of the 11 ruptured VBDAs, 4 were treated by single stents, 6 by double overlapping stents, and 1 by triple overlapping stents. Of the 18 unruptured VBDAs, 6 were treated by stents, and 12 by double overlapping stents. One patient with a ruptured VBDA, treated by single stent, had rebleeding and died. None of the remaining patients had posttreatment bleeding during follow-up (mean, 28 months; range, 7–50 months). Eight patients with ruptured VBDA and all patients with unruptured VBDA had excellent outcomes (modified Rankin Scale, 0–1). The remaining 2 patients with ruptured VBDA were moderately disabled because of the initial damage. Angiographic follow-up was available in 27 VBDAs, 4 to 42 months (mean, 12 months) after treatment. Follow-up angiograms revealed complete obliteration of the dissecting aneurysm in 12, partial obliteration in 12, stable in 1, enlargement in 1, and in-stent occlusion in 1. Angiographic improvement (complete or partial obliteration) was more frequent in the multiple-stent group (17/17) than in the single-stent group (7/9; P < .05). CONCLUSIONS: In this small series, stent-only therapy was safe and effective in the treatment of VBDAs that were not deemed suitable for treatment with parent-artery occlusion.
RELIGIOUS DOUBT AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING : A LONGITUDINAL INVESTIGATION

The purpose of this study is to see if religious doubt is associated with change in three measures of psychological well-being over time: life satisfaction, self-esteem, and optimism. Two main hypotheses are evaluated. The first specifies that greater doubt about religion is associated with a decline in well-being over time. The second hypothesis states that high levels of educational attainment tend to buffer or offset the deleterious effects of doubt on well-being. Data from a longitudinal nationwide survey of older adults provides support for both hypotheses. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, and recommendations for further work in the field are provided.
Recovery in Mobile Wireless Environment: Design and Trade-off Analysis

The mobile wireless environment poses challenging problems in designing fault-tolerant systems because of the dynamics of mobility, and limited bandwidth available on wireless links. Traditional fault-tolerance schemes, therefore, cannot be directly applied to these systems. Mobile systems are often subject to environmental conditions which can cause loss of communications or data. Because of the consumer orientation of most mobile systems, run-time faults must be corrected with minimal (if any) intervention from the user. The fault-tolerance capability, consequently, must, be transparent to the user. Presented here are schemes for recovery from a failure of a mobile host. This paper portrays the limitations of the mobile wireless environment, and their impact on recovery protocols. Toward this, adaptation of well-known recovery schemes are presented which suit the mobile environment. The performance of these schemes has been analyzed to determine those environments where a particular recovery scheme is best-suited. The performance of the recovery schemes primarily depends on (i) the wireless bandwidth, (ii) the communication-mobility ratio of the user, and (iii) the failure rate of the mobile host.
A spreadsheet model for using web service data

Web services offer a more reliable and efficient way to access online data than scraping web pages. However, web service data are often in complex hierarchical structures that make it difficult for people to extract the desired parts or to perform any further data manipulation without writing a significant amount of surprisingly intricate code. In this paper, we present Gneiss, a tool that extends the familiar spreadsheet metaphor to support working with data returned from web services. Gneiss allows users to extract the desired fields in web service data using drag-and-drop, and refine the results through spreadsheet formulas, along with sorting and filtering the data. Hierarchical data are stored as nested tables in the spreadsheet and can be flattened for future operations. Data flow is two-way between the spreadsheet and the web services, enabling people to easily make a new request by modifying spreadsheet cells. In addition, using the dependency between spreadsheet cells, our tool is able to create parallel-running data extractions based on the user's sequential demonstration. We use a set of examples to demonstrate our tool's ability to create fast and reusable data extraction and manipulation programs that work with complex web service data.
Wrong-side surgery: systems for prevention.

Wrong-side surgery is probably the most dramatic, visible and devastating of all surgical errors. It is arguably the error most feared by surgeons. Recently, there was a prominently profiled neurosurgical case that received a lot of publicity, perhaps more than it might have because it occurred in a highly renowned medical institution in the United States.1 In this paper I describe a case of a wrong-sided surgery as a platform to summarize the available literature with an emphasis on strategies to prevent such errors from harming patients.
The Expressiveness of SPC Synchronization Model : A Revision with Examples

SPC is a new parallel programming model that imposes synchro ization restrictions in order to allow for fully automatic, retargeta ble program optimization. Programming models aimed at optimum expressiveness of para llelism, however, are not amenable to static cost estimation. The motivation f or the model is the conjecture that in practice the loss of parallelism due to th e inherent synchronization restrictions is less than a very small factor for most pa rallel computations. The limited loss is outweighed by the potential of automatic per formance optimization as well as the portability that is achieved. In this paper we p rovide a complete introduction to the origins and advantages of the model, andupdated revision of the evidences in favor of the conjecture; mainly based on t he results of a largely empirical investigation into the ratio between the critica l paths of unstructured task graphs and their approximations under the restricted s ynchronization model. Examples are provided to show how is it possible to rewrite cl assical parallel problems in this model with almost no loss of parallelism.
Identification of human tRNA:m5C methyltransferase catalysing intron-dependent m5C formation in the first position of the anticodon of the pre-tRNA(CAA)Leu

We identified a human orthologue of tRNA:m5C methyltransferase from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which has been previously shown to catalyse the specific modification of C34 in the intron-containing yeast pre-tRNA(CAA)Leu. Using transcripts of intron-less and intron-containing human tRNA(CAA)Leu genes as substrates, we have shown that m5C34 is introduced only in the intron-containing tRNA precursors when the substrates were incubated in the HeLa extract. m5C34 formation depends on the nucleotide sequence surrounding the wobble cytidine and on the structure of the prolongated anticodon stem. Expression of the human Trm4 (hTrm4) cDNA in yeast partially complements the lack of the endogenous Trm4p enzyme. The yeast extract prepared from the strain deprived of the endogenous TRM4 gene and transformed with hTrm4 cDNA exhibits the same activity and substrate specificity toward human pre-tRNALeu transcripts as the HeLa extract. The hTrm4 MTase has a much narrower specificity against the yeast substrates than its yeast orthologue: human enzyme is not able to form m5C at positions 48 and 49 of human and yeast tRNA precursors. To our knowledge, this is the first report showing intron-dependent methylation of human pre-tRNA(CAA)Leu and identification of human gene encoding tRNA methylase responsible for this reaction.
Association between swimming performance, cardiorespiratory morphometry, and thermal tolerance in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.)

This experiment tested the hypothesis that swimming performance in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) parr is connected to cardiorespiratory performance and morphology, as well as maximum heart rate (fHmax) related measures of thermal tolerance. Moreover, it was hypothesized that the cardiorespiratory differences between poor and strong swimmers will be retained in a later life stage, i.e., 15 weeks post-smoltification and seawater transfer. This experiment screened a population of 3,200 parr (11.2 ± 0.25 g) for their swimming performance, classifying them as poor and good swimmers based on their critical swimming speeds (4.4±0.1 body length s-1 and >6.8±0.1 body length s-1, respectively). Compared with poor performing parr, good swimmers had a significantly thicker compact myocardium (by 23.7%) and taller gill secondary lamellae (by 16.2%). In contrast, there was no significant difference in maximum oxygen consumption between the two groups as assessed using a ‘chase’ protocol, and the relationship between heart rate specific measures of thermal tolerance and swim performance was variable. For example, three measures did not differ between the two groups, whereas the Arrhenius breakpoint temperature for fHmax and fHmax were higher and lower, respectively, in the poor swimmers. Importantly, the identified morphological and fHmax differences at the parr stage persisted after 15 weeks of common garden rearing in seawater, and they were associated with an increase in relative ventricular mass and a small, but significant, improvement in growth rate. Therefore, it seems that an early assessment of swimming performance can effectively screen for morphological capacities related to oxygen supply and growth rate, but less so for heart rate related measures of thermal tolerance.
Exact Correlators of Giant Gravitons from dual N=4 SYM

A class of correlation functions of half-BPS composite operators are computed exactly (at finite $N$) in the zero coupling limit of N=4 SYM theory. These have a simple dependence on the four-dimensional spacetime coordinates and are related to correlators in a one-dimensional Matrix Model with complex Matrices obtained by dimensional reduction of N=4 SYM on a three-sphere. A key technical tool is Frobenius-Schur duality between symmetric and Unitary groups and the results are expressed simply in terms of U(N) group integrals or equivalently in terms of Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. These correlation functions are used to understand the existence/properties of giant gravitons and related solutions in the string theory dual on $ AdS_5 \times S^5$. Some of their properties hint at integrability in N=4 SYM.
On block-recursive logarithmic filterbanks

Filterbanks with arbitrary time-frequency plane tilings can be efficiently realized by block-recursive structures which are based on vector ARMA models. The block-recursive realization leads to some approximation errors which depend among others on the block size and the block order of the model. A group of logarithmically spaced gammatone filters is used as a target system. The dependence of the design error on the choices of different design parameters are analysed. The resuls show that by proper choices of parameters the block-recursive structures are computationally efficient and of high quality.
Similar Bidders in Takeover Contests

When bidders in a corporate takeover have related resources and post-acquisition strategies, their valuations of a target are likely to be interdependent. This paper analyzes sequential-entry takeover contests in which similar bidders have correlated private valuations. The level of similarity affects information content of bids and bidding competition. Our model predicts that expected acquisition prices and the probability of multiple-bidder contests are the highest for intermediately similar bidders. We test these predictions in laboratory experiments in which we control the similarity between bidders. The experimental data confirm the non-monotonic effects of similarity on prices and on the frequency of multiple-bidder contents.