Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wald Lecture I: Counting Bits with Kolmogorov and Shannon

Shannon’s Rate-Distortion Theory describes the number of bits needed to approximately represent typical realizations of a stochastic process X = (X(t) : t ∈ T ), while Kolmogorov’s ǫ-entropy describes the number of bits needed to approximately represent an arbitrary member f = (f(t) : t ∈ T ) of a functional class F . For many stochastic processes a great deal is known about the behavior of the rate distortion function, while for few functional classes F has there been success in determining, say, the precise asymptotics of the ǫ-entropy. Let W 2,0(γ) denote the class of functions f(t) on T = [0, 2π) with periodic boundary conditions and 1 2π ∫ 2π 0 f(t)dt + 1 2π ∫ 2π 0 f (t)dt ≤ γ. We show that for approximating functions of this class in L norm we have the precise asymptotics of the Kolmogorov ǫentropy: Hǫ(W m 2,0(γ)) ∼ 2m(log2 e)(γ/2ǫ) , ǫ → 0. (0.1) This follows from a connection between the Shannon and Kolmogorov theories, which allows us to exploit the powerful formalism of Shannon’s Rate-Distortion theory to obtain information about the Kolmogorov ǫ-entropy. In fact, the Kolmogorov ǫ-entropy is asymptotically equivalent, as ǫ → 0, to the maximum Rate-Distortion R(D,X) over all stochastic processes X with sample paths in W 2,0(γ), where we make the calibration D = ǫ . There is a family of Gaussian processes X∗ D which asymptotically, as D → 0, take realizations in W 2,0(γ), and for which the process at index D has essentially the highest rate-distortion R(D,X) of all processes X living in W 2,0(γ). We evaluate the rate-distortion function of members of this family, giving formula (0.1). These results strongly parallel a key result in modern statistical decision theory, Pinsker’s theorem. This points to a connection between theories of statistical estimation and data compression, which will be the theme of these Lectures.
FastFunction: Replacing a herd of lemmings with a cheetah a ruby framework for interaction with PostgreSQL databases

The ability of web applications to respond fast is critical to the success of any web-based business, and time spent on the interaction with the database is often the most time-consuming portion of the overall response time. Although recent research suggest lots of proven algorithms to improve this interaction, the technicalities of implementation are often considered too time consuming by application developers. In this paper we present a tool that eliminates a significant portion of these technical difficulties and allows almost seamless incorporation of complex database queries and functions into object-oriented applications.
Anisotropy of spin relaxation and transverse transport in metals

Using first-principles methods we explore the anisotropy of the spin relaxation and transverse transport properties in bulk metals with respect to the real-space direction of the spin-quantization axis in paramagnets or of the spontaneous magnetization in ferromagnets. Owing to the presence of the spin–orbit coupling the orbital and spin character of the Bloch states depends sensitively on the orientation of the spins relative to the crystal axes. This leads to drastic changes in quantities which rely on interband mixing induced by the spin–orbit interaction. The anisotropy is particularly striking for quantities which exhibit spiky and irregular distributions in the Brillouin zone, such as the spin-mixing parameter or the Berry curvature of the electronic states. We demonstrate this for three cases: (i) the Elliott–Yafet spin-relaxation mechanism in paramagnets with structural inversion symmetry; (ii) the intrinsic anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnets; and (iii) the spin Hall effect in paramagnets. We discuss the consequences of the pronounced anisotropic behavior displayed by these properties for spin-polarized transport applications.
TempoString: a tangible tool for children's music creation

In this paper, we introduce the design and implementation of TempoString, an easy-to-use tool which assists children with music creation. It provides such a fun and novel platform by allowing children to "draw" music on a canvas and then edit it using a rope. The main contribution of our work is the novel access which allows children to "paint" music on a canvas and then edit using a rope.
The Cancer Informatics Infrastructure (CII): An Architecture for Translating Clinical Research into Patient Care

Today, the clinical trial process remains slow and paper-based. The creation of a Cancer Informatics Infrastructure (CII) can provide the architectural base across the continuum of cancer research and cancer care. Recommendations of a Long Range Planning Committee identified near-term activities for the Office of Informatics at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). These include participating in national standards development; fostering oncology-related terminology and standards, e.g., Common Data Elements (CDEs); and leveraging mainstream informatics and Internet technologies, using the successful Internet model that focuses on facilitating stakeholder participation, sponsoring the CII rather than subsidizing it, and providing a test bed as well as an infrastructure. Diffusion tactics include extending the CII concept beyond its "early adopters" to the wider community through recommendations for the near-term and development of a major document defining next-phase activities.
Dissociable Influences of Opiates and Expectations on Pain

Placebo treatments and opiate drugs are thought to have common effects on the opioid system and pain-related brain processes. This has created excitement about the potential for expectations to modulate drug effects themselves. If drug effects differ as a function of belief, this would challenge the assumptions underlying the standard clinical trial. We conducted two studies to directly examine the relationship between expectations and opioid analgesia. We administered the opioid agonist remifentanil to human subjects during experimental thermal pain and manipulated participants' knowledge of drug delivery using an open-hidden design. This allowed us to test drug effects, expectancy (knowledge) effects, and their interactions on pain reports and pain-related responses in the brain. Remifentanil and expectancy both reduced pain, but drug effects on pain reports and fMRI activity did not interact with expectancy. Regions associated with pain processing showed drug-induced modulation during both Open and Hidden conditions, with no differences in drug effects as a function of expectation. Instead, expectancy modulated activity in frontal cortex, with a separable time course from drug effects. These findings reveal that opiates and placebo treatments both influence clinically relevant outcomes and operate without mutual interference.
The Effects of Section 201 Safeguards on U.S. Industries

This Note presents evidence on the effectiveness of temporary trade barriers, known as safeguards, implemented under section 201 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974. Despite significant debate regarding the political and legal challenges posed by section 201, little research exists to determine how domestic industries— the intended beneficiaries of safeguards—perform after safeguards terminate. This study examines the performance of three domestic industries that recently received safeguard protection. The Note finds that none of the three industries were restored to sustained competitiveness. The Note then introduces policy recommendations for reforming section 201 to enhance its effectiveness.
Low-Dimensional Discriminative Reranking

The accuracy of many natural language processing tasks can be improved by a reranking step, which involves selecting a single output from a list of candidate outputs generated by a baseline system. We propose a novel family of reranking algorithms based on learning separate low-dimensional embeddings of the task's input and output spaces. This embedding is learned in such a way that prediction becomes a low-dimensional nearest-neighbor search, which can be done computationally efficiently. A key quality of our approach is that feature engineering can be done separately on the input and output spaces; the relationship between inputs and outputs is learned automatically. Experiments on part-of-speech tagging task in four languages show significant improvements over a baseline decoder and existing reranking approaches.
Association between right ventricular function and perfusion abnormalities in hemodynamically stable patients with acute pulmonary embolism.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Patients presenting with acute pulmonary embolism associated with hemodynamic compromise exhibit right ventricular enlargement and dysfunction on transthoracic echocardiogram. However, the degree of echocardiographic abnormalities among hemodynamically stable patients without preexisting cardiopulmonary disease during the acute stage of pulmonary embolism, and following treatment, is unknown. Therefore, this study was designed to assess the extent of right ventricular abnormalities detected on transthoracic echocardiogram in patients following acute pulmonary embolism and during treatment with anticoagulation or vena caval interruption. The extent of pulmonary vascular obstruction and complication rate on follow-up were also assessed. DESIGN/INTERVENTIONS Sixty-four consecutive hemodynamically stable patients without preexisting known cardiopulmonary disorder presenting with acute pulmonary embolism and undergoing treatment with anticoagulation or inferior vena caval interruption were studied. All subjects underwent a two-dimensional transthoracic echocardiogram within 24 h of diagnosis. The degree of perfusion abnormality on lung scan was quantified. Twenty-six patients underwent follow-up echocardiogram and lung scan at 6 weeks. The echocardiographic findings were compared with those obtained from a group of normal control subjects matched for gender and age. RESULTS Although the mean right ventricular end-diastolic areas did not differ (21.9+/-5.2 cm2 vs 20.1+/-2.9 cm2 for control subjects; p=not significant), the right ventricular end-systolic area was larger in comparison to our series of control subjects (14.6+/-5.1 cm2 vs 11.7+/-2.0 cm2; p=0.025). Fractional right ventricular area change was reduced in the patient group compared with the control subjects (34.3+/-9.0% vs 41.3+/-7.0%; p=0.003). The extent of right ventricular end-systolic area enlargement and decrease in fractional area change did not correlate with the degree of pulmonary vascular obstruction. Patients who were restudied at 6 weeks showed minimal improvement in echocardiographic findings, despite almost complete resolution of perfusion defects on lung scan. CONCLUSIONS The extent of right ventricular dysfunction in hemodynamically stable, previously normal patients with acute pulmonary embolism does not reflect the extent of the perfusion abnormalities. Further, right ventricular enlargement and systolic dysfunction are present and persistent despite treatment with heparin and warfarin therapy or vena caval interruption.
Photodynamic therapy in combating the causative microorganisms from endodontic infections

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is presented as a promising antimicrobial therapy that can eliminate microorganisms present in endodontic infections. This treatment is based on the use of a nontoxic photosensitizing agent followed by irradiation of a resonant light source being capable of generating highly reactive species that are harmful to microorganisms. The purpose of this paper is to review the dental literature about the main factors that encompass the use of PDT combined with endodontic treatment for decontamination of the root canal system. A literature search was performed using the following index databases: PubMed, ISI Web of Knowledge and MedLine, between 2000 and 2014, looking for studies regarding antimicrobial action of PDT and its application to endodontic therapy. It was observed that despite numerous promising results, it is still necessary to establish different parameters so that PDT can be used with maximum effectiveness in eliminating microorganisms that cause endodontic infections.
Large Effects of Moho Reflections (SmS) on Peak Ground Motion in Northwestern Taiwan

Abstract A total of 336 three-component strong-motion recordings from the M w 6.35 Niu Dou earthquake of 25 June 1995 at a focal depth of 39.9 km in northern Taiwan are used to study the effects on strong ground motion due to Moho reflection of S waves. The residuals of both horizontal peak ground acceleration (PGA) and peak ground velocity (PGV) recorded from the earthquake are analyzed. The results confirm that many Class E soft soil stations in the Taipei Basin and the Ilan Plain had the expected large amplification of about 1.7 and 1.5 times, respectively, the predicted median PGA values. Surprisingly, a large group of Class C or D dense and stiff soil sites in Taoyuan (TCU007), Lungtan (TCU013), Guanshi (TCU021), Hsinchu (TCU095), and Miaoli (TCU047) areas in northwestern Taiwan had unusually large amplification of about 3.4–8.1 and 1.7–3.3 times the predicted median PGA and PGV values, respectively. They are interpreted in terms of focusing and interference between SmS waves reflected from the horizontal and inclined portions of an east-dipping Moho discontinuity in this area. This interpretation is supported by the close agreement between the expected amplitudes and arrival times of the largest shear waves with the observed data. Our results suggest that when a damaging earthquake occurs near an inclined Moho boundary, the reflected SmS waves can result in significantly amplified ground motions at distances beginning about 50 km. The exact distance range will depend on the thickness of the crust and the dip angle of the Moho boundary.
On the Relationship between Two Notions of Compatibility for Bi-Hamiltonian Systems ?

Bi-Hamiltonian structures are of great importance in the theory of integrable Hamiltonian systems. The notion of compatibility of symplectic structures is a key aspect of bi-Hamiltonian systems. Because of this, a few different notions of compatibility have been introduced. In this paper we show that, under some additional assumptions, compatibility in the sense of Magri implies a notion of compatibility due to Fass o and Ratiu, that we dub bi-affine compatibility. We present two proofs of this fact. The first one uses the uniqueness of the connection parallelizing all the Hamiltonian vector fields tangent to the leaves of a Lagrangian foliation. The second proof uses Darboux{Nijenhuis coordinates and symplectic connections.
WNT SIGNALLING REGULATES SELF-RENEWAL AND DIFFERENTIATION OF PROSTATE CANCER CELLS WITH STEM CELL CHARACTERISTICS Running Title WNT regulates prostate cancer stem cell attributes

Prostate cancer cells with stem cell characteristics were identified in human prostate cancer cell lines by their ability to form from single cells self-renewing prostaspheres in nonadherent cultures. Prostaspheres exhibited heterogeneous expression of proliferation, differentiation and stem cell associated makers CD44, ABCG2 and CD133. Treatment with WNT inhibitors reduced both prostasphere size and self-renewal. In contrast, addition of Wnt3a caused increased prostasphere size and self-renewal, which was associated with a significant increase in nuclear β-catenin, keratin 18, CD133 and CD44 expression. As a high proportion of LNCaP and C4-2B cancer cells express androgen receptor we determined the affect of the androgen receptor antagonist bicalutamide. Androgen receptor inhibition reduced prostasphere size and expression of PSA, but did not inhibit prostasphere formation. These effects are consistent with the androgen independent self renewal of cells with stem cell characteristics and the androgen dependent proliferation of transit amplifying cells. As the canonical WNT signalling effector β-catenin can also associate with the androgen receptor. We propose a model for tumour propagation involving a balance between WNT and androgen receptor activity. That would affect the self-renewal of a cancer cell with stem cell characteristics and drive transit amplifying cell proliferation and differentiation. In conclusion, we provide evidence that WNT activity regulates the self-renewal of prostate cancer cells with stem cell characteristics independently of androgen receptor activity. The inhibition of WNT signalling therefore has the potential to reduce the self-renewal of prostate cancer cells with stem cell characteristics and improve therapeutic outcome.
A Magnetic Tunnel Junction Compact Model for STT-RAM and MeRAM

This report presents a compact model of a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) for use in the design and simulation of spin-transfer torque (STT) and magnetoelectric random access memory (MeRAM). In STT-RAM, the magnetic state of an MTJ is switched by applying a spin-polarized current through the junction. In MeRAM, the MTJ state is manipulated primarily by a voltage-induced electric field. Both of these competing state-of-the-art non-volatile magnetic memory technologies offer significant area and energy advantages over traditional SRAM, DRAM, and Flash memories. In this work, the physics behind an MTJ is explored to develop a Verilog-A model that captures the switching dynamics and accounts for the following phenomena: spin-torque, field-like torque, external magnetic fields, shape anisotropy, the voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) effect, and thermal noise. Simulations were performed in Cadence to confirm correct switching operation of an STT-RAM MTJ and junctions designed for MeRAM switching in both the precessional and thermally activated regimes.
Analysis of Thermodynamic Models and Performance in RnaPredict - An Evolutionary Algorithm for RNA Folding

Two extensive analyzes on RnaPredict, an evolutionary algorithm for RNA folding, are presented here. The first study evaluates the performance of individual nearest neighbor (INN) and individual nearest neighbor-hydrogen bond (INN-HB), two stacking-energy thermodynamic models; the criteria for comparison is the correlation between the prediction accuracy and the free energy of predicted structures for 9 RNA sequences. Despite some variance, a trend between lower free energies and increases in true positive base pairs is apparent. In general, this correlation decreases as the sequence length increases. The second study compares the performance of RnaPredict against the mfold dynamic programming algorithm (DPA) on the same sequences in terms of specificity and sensitivity. The results indicate that RnaPredict has comparable performance to mfold on sub-optimal structures, and outperforms mfold's minimum free energy structures
MAC-aware routing in wireless mesh networks

We propose expected throughput, ETP, a new and improved routing metric for wireless mesh networks. In contrast to previously proposed routing metrics, ETP takes into account the bandwidth sharing mechanism of 802.11 DCF. In this mechanism, contending links with lower nominal bit rate degrade the throughput of faster links. It is evident that this MAC layer interaction impacts the link quality, and subsequently, the route quality. We develop an analytical model to capture the above interaction, and use it to define ETP. ETP is therefore expected to yield more accurate throughput estimations than existing routing metrics. Furthermore, ETP is suitable as a routing metric in multi-rate as well as multi-channel mesh networks
A novel approach to a camera based assisstive aid for visually impaired

In this paper, we present a progressive work for developing an assistive aid for visually impaired, which will help them in color identification, currency denomination recognition, obstacle detection as well as reading newspapers and books. The device is conceptualized as a portable device with all the processing being done on chip and finally aural output being produced. The device is tested in a restricted environment and gave different accuracies for different modules. The colors are identified with an accuracy of 89.1% whereas various currency denominations are recognized with an accuracy of 88.25%. The obstacle detection is successful all the times, leading to an accuracy of 100%. The algorithm developed for text extraction in the reading module gives a precision rate of 86.7% and recall of 80.7%.
Correcting Deletions Using Linear and Cyclic Codes

Linear and cyclic codes are typically used to combat substitution errors. However, synchronization errors, associated with the deletion and insertion of symbols, can cause severe performance degradation unless the coding scheme possesses the capability to recover from such errors. It is shown that linear codes of rate greater than 1/2 cannot correct deletion or insertion errors but there are linear codes of rate 1/2 that can correct these errors. Although cyclic codes, except for repetition codes, cannot correct deletion or insertion errors, two approaches are investigated to yield codes, based on cyclic codes, that can correct these errors. In the first approach, it is shown that a binary or nonbinary cyclic code of rate at most 1/3 or 1/2, respectively, can be extended by one symbol to make it capable of correcting synchronization errors. In the second approach, a cyclic code of rate at most 1/2 is expurgated by appropriately deleting codewords such that the expurgated code is capable of correcting synchronization errors. It is shown that deleting codewords costs at most two information bits if the code is binary and one information symbol if the code is nonbinary.
49 2 The Neuroscience of Goal-Directed Behavior

I f you ask average Americans to list their goals (as the website http:// www.43things.com asks them to do) their answers run the gamut from “being happy” to “going on a road trip with no predetermined destination” (Table 2.1). Although people’s goals vary widely in what they aim to achieve and the obstacles that would be involved, they all have a few things in common. For one, they describe activities and outcomes with an abstractness and complexity far greater than what nonhuman animals probably would ever conceive. For another, it is clear that achieving any of their goals requires a system that can translate these abstract goals for a future state of the world into concrete actions in the present moment that are thought would get them there. This is no easy task. Not only must abstract goals (e.g., stop procrastinating) be translated into intermediate goals and actionable subgoals, but typically these (sub)goals require behaving in a way contrary to our ingrained habits and tendencies (e.g., turn off reality television until the book chapter is fi nished). If we are interested in studying what brain mechanisms enable people to achieve their goals using these and other processes, then the types of goals we end up studying are necessarily a good bit simpler than “getting a tattoo” or “going to Europe. ” A critical assumption behind this approach is that the neural systems studied in well-controlled laboratory settings are the same as those that are used to achieve more realistic and complicated goals in real life. For instance, one common goal is to quit smoking, in which individuals experience confl ict between craving