Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of Code Error and Beat Frequency Test Method to Identify Single Event Upset Sensitive Circuits in a 1 GHz Analog to Digital Converter

Typical test methods for characterizing the single event upset performance of an analog to digital converter (ADC) have involved holding the input at static values. As a result, output error signatures are seen for only a few input voltage and output codes. A test method using an input beat frequency and output code error detection allows an ADC to be characterized with a dynamic input at a high frequency. With this method, the impact of an ion strike can be seen over the full code range of the output. The error signatures from this testing can provide clues to which area of the ADC is sensitive to an ion strike.
Forgetting and Generalisation in Memory Modelling for Robot Companions : a Data Mining Approach

The idea of a robot as a long-term companion has not been widely accepted and sometimes not even considered or imagined. Hence, several issues should be addressed in order to facilitate this long-term human-robot interaction. This work focuses on the memory modelling for artificial companions and its forgetting processes by proposing a novel approach based on hierarchical classification data mining techniques to implement memory generalisation mechanisms.
Authentication and Confidentiality in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The security services of authentication and confidentiality are of significant importance to ensure secure communication in any network. The decentralized nature and the broadcast medium of communication of wireless ad hoc networks results in unique challenges in realizing the services of authentication and data confidentiality. In this chapter, We first highlight the issues relating to authentication and confidentiality in wireless ad hoc networks and identify the characteristics of these services. Subsequently, we discuss the security mechanisms proposed for authentication and confidentiality in wireless ad hoc networks. The chapter also includes a detailed discussion about the standards IEEE 802.1X (Authentication) and IEEE 802.11i (Confidentiality).
Accuracy of reading liquid based cytology slides using the ThinPrep Imager compared with conventional cytology: prospective study

Objective To compare the accuracy of liquid based cytology using the computerised ThinPrep Imager with that of manually read conventional cytology. Design Prospective study. Setting Pathology laboratory in Sydney, Australia. Participants 55 164 split sample pairs (liquid based sample collected after conventional sample from one collection) from consecutive samples of women choosing both types of cytology and whose specimens were examined between August 2004 and June 2005. Main outcome measures Primary outcome was accuracy of slides for detecting squamous lesions. Secondary outcomes were rate of unsatisfactory slides, distribution of squamous cytological classifications, and accuracy of detecting glandular lesions. Results Fewer unsatisfactory slides were found for imager read cytology than for conventional cytology (1.8% v 3.1%; P<0.001). More slides were classified as abnormal by imager read cytology (7.4% v 6.0% overall and 2.8% v 2.2% for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia of grade 1 or higher). Among 550 patients in whom imager read cytology was cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 1 or higher and conventional cytology was less severe than grade 1, 133 of 380 biopsy samples taken were high grade histology. Among 294 patients in whom imager read cytology was less severe than cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 1 and conventional cytology was grade 1 or higher, 62 of 210 biopsy samples taken were high grade histology. Imager read cytology therefore detected 71 more cases of high grade histology than did conventional cytology, resulting from 170 more biopsies. Similar results were found when one pathologist reread the slides, masked to cytology results. Conclusion The ThinPrep Imager detects 1.29 more cases of histological high grade squamous disease per 1000 women screened than conventional cytology, with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 1 as the threshold for referral to colposcopy. More imager read slides than conventional slides were satisfactory for examination and more contained low grade cytological abnormalities.
A comprehensive study on state of Scrum development

The software industry has moved from the traditional software development to the agile software development model. Under this umbrella there are many methodologies which are Scrum, Extreme Programming, Crystal, FDD (Feature-driven development), DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method), etc. This paper investigates about the current state of Scrum, its popularity and its evolution in the recent five years. We have taken into consideration the published literature and industrial survey. Our result reveals that among various agile methodologies, Scrum is a popular software development methodology used by industries and it is also the area of interest for the research community.
Commonalities of Science Interests Held by Intermediate Grade Children *

One of the problems confronting education today is concerned with the search for effective ways of teaching science in the elementary school. It has become increasingly apparent, for example, that young children require an understanding of certain simple scientific principles to use as they attempt to solve the alarming environmental problems that threaten the existence of life itself. As science takes its place as an integral part of the elementary school curriculum, it is imperative that every effort be made to discover rather precisely the nature and scope of the interests that children display in particular areas of science. A fair uniformity exists in the thinking today that learning is likely to occur more deliberately and more readily when a child accepts as useful and important those learning activities in which he is expected to engage. The improvement of science education in the United States has, in the past, been thwarted simply because basic statistical data about the nature and scope of science interests held by elementary grade children are surprisingly lacking. The problem: A study was undertaken to determine the particular areas in science which are of common interest to intermediate grade boys and girls from three different environmental settings. The following specific problems were examined as they developed from the larger central purpose of the study:
Investigation of bacterial growth on mixed substrates: Experimental evaluation of cybernetic models

Cybernetic models, developed earlier by the authors, have been evaluated experimentally for the growth of Klebsiella oxytoca in batch cultures using mixed substrates from glucose, xylose, arabinose, lactose, and fructose. Based entirely on information procured from batch growth on single substrates, the models accurately predict without further parameter fitting, diauxic growth on mixed substrates, automatically predicting the order in which the substrates are consumed. Even triauxic growth on a mixture of glucose, xylose, and lactose is predicted by the model based on single substrate data. Growth on glucose‐fructose mixtures appears to need a slightly modified strategy for cybernetic variables.
Effects of Album and Artist Filters in Audio Similarity Computed for Very Large Music Databases

In music information retrieval, one of the central goals is to automatically recommend music to users based on a query song or query artist. This can be done using expert knowledge (e.g., www.pandora.com), social meta-data (e.g., www.last.fm), collaborative filtering (e.g., www.amazon.com/mp3), or by extracting information directly from the audio (e.g., www.muffin.com). In audio-based music recommendation, a wellknown effect is the dominance of songs from the same artist as the query song in recommendation lists. This effect has been studied mainly in the context of genre-classification experiments. Because no ground truth with respect to music similarity usually exists, genre classification is widely used for evaluation of music similarity. Each song is labelled as belonging to a music genre using, e.g., advice of a music expert. High genre classification results indicate good similarity measures. If, in genre classification experiments, songs from the same artist are allowed in both training and test sets, this can lead to over-optimistic results since usually all songs from an artist have the same genre label. It can be argued that in such a scenario one is doing artist classification rather than genre classification. One could even speculate that the specific sound of an album (mastering and production effects) is being classified. In Pampalk, Flexer, and Widmer (2005) the use of a so-called “artist filter” that ensures that a given artist’s songs are either all in the training set, or all in the test set, is proposed. Those authors found that the use of such an artist filter can lower the
Support vector machines for noise robust ASR

Using discriminative classifiers, such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) in combination with, or as an alternative to, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) has a number of advantages for difficult speech recognition tasks. For example, the models can make use of additional dependencies in the observation sequences than HMMs provided the appropriate form of kernel is used. However standard SVMs are binary classifiers, and speech is a multi-class problem. Furthermore, to train SVMs to distinguish word pairs requires that each word appears in the training data. This paper examines both of these limitations. Tree-based reduction approaches for multiclass classification are described, as well as some of the issues in applying them to dynamic data, such as speech. To address the training data issues, a simplified version of HMM-based synthesis can be used, which allows data for any word-pair to be generated. These approaches are evaluated on two noise corrupted digit sequence tasks: AURORA 2.0; and actual in-car collected data.
Embracement of E-Tourism in Ecotourism: A Case Study of Tourism Websites for Galapagos

Ecotourism and e-tourism are both perceived as the overwhelming trend for today¡¦s tourism industry, and share some common features on both demand and supply sides, which lays the foundation for the feasibility of the application of e-tourism to ecotourism. The objective of this paper is to identify the critical issues of integration between them two through the empirical analysis of Ecuadorian Galapagos, which is generally accepted as an exemplary demonstration for ecotourism initiatives in the world. A total number of eighty-six websites concerning tourism in Galapagos are found and categorized into three types in terms of their hosts or affiliations, namely, tourism companies, governments and non-governmental organizations and professional tourism websites. As the focus of this study, the seventy-two websites belonging to tourism companies are examined in great depth, from aspects of inclusion of travel information, customer relationship management, online transaction and advocacy of ecotourism. As the findings show, these website have made good use of the sound environment and unique resources of Galapagos to boost their business, and have done well in information provision and customer relationship management, but still have considerable room for improvement in advocating ecotourism or responsible travel through online environmental education and visitor management. Finally, a few recommendations are proposed accordingly.
Investigating accretion disk – radio jet coupling across the stellar mass scale

Abstract Relationships between the X-ray and radio behavior of black hole X-ray binaries during outbursts have established a fundamental coupling between the accretion disks and radio jets in these systems. I begin by reviewing the prevailing paradigm for this disk-jet coupling, also highlighting what we know about similarities and differences with neutron star and white dwarf binaries. Until recently, this paradigm had not been directly tested with dedicated high-angular resolution radio imaging over entire outbursts. Moreover, such high-resolution monitoring campaigns had not previously targetted outbursts in which the compact object was either a neutron star or a white dwarf. To address this issue, we have embarked on the Jet Acceleration and Collimation Probe Of Transient X-Ray Binaries (JACPOT XRB) project, which aims to use high angular resolution observations to compare disk-jet coupling across the stellar mass scale, with the goal of probing the importance of the depth of the gravitational potential well, the stellar surface and the stellar magnetic field, on jet formation. Our team has recently concluded its first monitoring series, including (E)VLA, VLBA, X-ray, optical, and near-infrared observations of entire outbursts of the black hole candidate H 1743-322, the neutron star system Aquila X-1, and the white dwarf system SS Cyg. Here I present preliminary results from this work, largely confirming the current paradigm, but highlighting some intriguing new behavior, and suggesting a possible difference in the jet formation process between neutron star and black hole systems.
Innovation Styles, Processes, and their Drivers: An Organizational Perspective

Technology innovation is not just a result of funds invested in research and development of a firm; it is a culmination of long-standing investments in well-thought-out processes, plans, and strategies. The chapter aims to address these aspects of technological innovations. The innovation process is a unique one, and each firm has a different style of bringing in innovation as per their requirements. These diverse innovation requirements are a direct consequence of the organizational structure and the innovation philosophies that those structures have embedded in them. Based on academic research done over the past decades on topics of organizational impact of innovation, the authors analyze the different innovation philosophies that organizations have, the processes that organizations use to promote innovation, as well as the drivers that impact these philosophies and processes.
Pseudorandom Testability – Study of the Effect of the Generator Type

In a pseudo-random testing of combinational circuits the pattern generator produces test vectors that are being applied to the tested circuit. The nature of the generator thus di rectly influences the fault coverage achieved. In this paper we discuss an influence of the type of t he pseudo-random pattern generator on the fault coverage. In most cases the LFSR is used as a pattern gener ator, while its generating polynomial is primitive to ensure a maximal period. We show that using pri mitive polynomials is not necessary, and in most cases even undesirable. This fact is documented by statistical graphs. The necessity of properly selecting a generating polynomial and a LFSR seed is shown here, by designing a mixed-mode BIST for the ISCAS benchmarks.
A new index structure combines a cluster algorithm with block distance

Many index structures for high-dimensional data have become very complex and their complexity may not matched by the increase of performance. Block distance is widely used for similarity measurement, and it is very simple and efficient. The index structures that map the high-dimensional data to single dimension values are relative simple and efficient. But none of these index structures can directly support the use of block distance for similarity search. In this paper, a new simple and yet efficient index structure called CBlockB-Tree is proposed. Our approach uses the cluster algorithm to divide the high-dimensional space into several clusters. And then for each cluster, map the high-dimensional feature data in this cluster to single dimension key values by the block distance between each feature date and its cluster center, and use the compact B+-tree to manage these key values. This index structure can not only directly support the use of block distance for similarity search, but also can effectively support the use of Euclidean distance for similarity search. Moreover, experimental results show that our simple index structure outperforms the NB-Tree and the BlockB-Tree we proposed previously.
Marrying Software Fault Injection Technology Results with Software Reliability Growth Models

Combining fault injection technology with software reliability growth models promises to improve both the reliability of software and accuracy of software reliability predictions. This result is achieved by injecting faults to corrupt the internal states of the software to test its fault tolerance. At the same time, this process yields realistic failure data for input to reliability models for improved accuracy of prediction.
A model matching for the stabilization of the two Wheels Inverted Pendulum

In this article, a model matching controller for the stabilization of the Two Wheels Inverted Pendulum is present. The stabilization strategy consists in forcing the closed-loop system to behave as another nonlinear target system with some stability properties. To this end, we solve two matching conditions that allow us to shape a suitable target system and we obtain the stabilizing controller. The resulting closed-loop system is locally asymptotically exponentially stable, with a very large domain of attraction.
Psychosocial Risk Factors for Cognitive Decline in Late-Life Depression: Findings from the MTLD-III Study

Background Cognitive impairment and depression frequently co-occur in late life. There remains a need to better characterize psychosocial risk factors of cognitive decline in older adults with depression. We hypothesized that certain psychosocial factors would be associated with higher risk of cognitive decline in individuals with late-life depression. Methods 130 individuals aged ≥ 65 years who had achieved remission from a major depressive episode were randomized to donepezil or placebo and then closely followed for two years. Using Cox proportional hazard models, we examined the association between baseline median household income, education level, race, marital status, and social support and cognitive decline over the follow-up. Results Lower interpersonal support (OR = 0.86 [0.74–0.99], p = .04) and lower baseline global neuropsychological score (OR = 0.56 [0.36–0.87], p = .001) predicted shorter time to conversion to MCI or dementia in univariate models. These exposures did not remain significant in multivariate analyses. Neither socioeconomic status nor other psychosocial factors independently predicted cognitive diagnostic conversion (p > .05). Conclusions We did not find reliable associations between cognitive outcome and any of the psychosocial factors examined. Future large-scale, epidemiological studies, ideally using well-validated subjective measures, should better characterize psychosocial risk factors for cognitive decline in late-life depression.
Perspectives on a potential North American monetary union

The idea of a single currency for the United States, Canada, and Mexico usually refers to one of two approaches: the unilateral adoption of the U.S. dollar by Canada and Mexico-dollarization-or monetary union, the development of a joint currency that could be managed by all three countries. ; This article examines the idea of monetary union in North America. The author discusses specific criteria for a single currency for North America as well as the pros and cons of a monetary union and dollarization in the North American context. The evidence presented suggests that Canada and perhaps even Mexico are candidates for forming a single-currency area with the United States at some stage. The article concludes that monetary union appears to hold several advantages over dollarization from the perspective of both the United States and its NAFTA partners. However, an important question remains to be answered: Are the NAFTA countries currently ready for a monetary union? The answer involves both economic and political variables as well as some practical implications. It seems unlikely that the United States, Canada, and Mexico will pursue this goal in the near future.
Prognostic Role of C-Reactive Protein in Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: C-reactive protein (CRP) which used to be a prototypical inflammatory cytokine has been identified involving in the progression of tumor-promoting inflammation. Several studies have indicated that CRP is a predictor for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the results are controversial. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of ten studies (1885 patients) to examine the association of high serum CRP expression with overall survival (OS) and recurrence-free survival (RFS) in HCC patients by meta-analysis. Moreover, the correlation between high serum CRP and tumor clinicopathological parameters was also assessed. Hazard ratio (HR) or odds ratio (OR) with its 95% confidence interval (CI) was used as the effect size estimate. Results: Our pooled results showed that high expression level of serum CRP (≥10 mg/L) was associated with poor OS (HR: 2.15, 95% CI: 1.76-2.63) and RFS (HR: 2.66, 95% CI: 1.54-4.58) in HCC. Serum CRP overexpression (≥10 mg/L) was also significantly associated with the presence of tumor vascular invasion (OR: 3.05, 95% CI: 1.79-5.23), multiple tumor (OR: 2.36, 95% CI: 1.36-4.10), larger tumor size (OR: 3.41, 95% CI: 1.04-11.18), and advanced TNM stage (OR: 3.23, 95% CI: 2.29-4.57). In addition, serum CRP overexpression (≥10 mg/L) tended to be correlated with poor differentiation (OR: 1.58, 95% CI: 0.74-3.39), though not significantly. Conclusion: The present systematic review and meta-analysis demonstrate that high serum level of CRP (≥10 mg/L) denotes a poor prognosis of patients with HCC.