Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fault Tolerant ALU System

This paper presents the design of FAULT TOLERANT ALU SYSTEM by using Triple Modular Redundancy. ALU is a critical component of microprocessor and is the core component of central processing unit. Therefore, it is necessary for making the ALU to be fault tolerant. The use of voting logic and disagreement detector has been implied in making the ALU system to be fault tolerant. The source code for the following was developed in VerilogHDL. The software used was XilinxISE.
Evaluation des capacités de mémoire de travail chez les enfants drépanocytaires : comparaison d'enfants camerounais et occidentaux

La presente etude a pour objectif de comparer les performances en memoire de travail des enfants drepanocytaires suivis au Cameroun et ceux suivis a Geneve et a Nantes, afin de determiner les effets de la prise en charge sur le fonctionnement cognitif. La drepanocytose touche principalement l'Afrique et a des consequences cerebro-vasculaires et cognitives importantes. Nos hypotheses principales enoncent que les drepanocytaires presentent des difficultes en memoire de travail par rapport a la population tout-venant, que ces difficultes augmentent avec l'âge et que les drepanocytaires camerounais ont une moins bonne capacite de memoire de travail que les drepanocytaires occidentaux. Nous avons evalue 12 enfants drepanocytaires occidentaux âges de 7 a 17 ans, a l'aide d'une batterie neuropsychologique mesurant principalement l'attention et les fonctions executives dans le cadre d'un bilan complet. Les resultats mettent en evidence des difficultes en memoire de travail qui diminuent avec l'âge de maniere non significative. De plus, les drepanocytaires occidentaux obtiennent de meilleures performances que les drepanocytaires camerounais. Toutefois, cette difference est minime, suggerant un faible impact de la prise en charge sur la memoire de travail.
Addiction to Technologies: A Social Psychological Perspective of Internet Addiction

In recent years, there has been a large amount of scientific and media attention toward what some clinicians have termed "Internet addiction. " This article asserts that habitual use or misuse of technological innovations is not a new phenomenon. "Internet addiction" is examined in light of research and theory on how people interact with technologies. The literature reveals that we have been concerned with the habitual use of a variety of new technologies developed during the twentieth century. Internet addiction is discussed in the context of issues such as the compulsive use of technologies such as television and video games. It is suggested that Internet addiction may not be a parsimonious explanation for the overuse of the Internet. An alternative explanation of the role that technologies play in the formation of maladaptive behavior is presented. In conclusion, it is explained that while technology may expand our capabilities (e.g., increases social contacts), it may also expand our capacity to express maladaptive behaviors and psychopathologies.
Partisan Poll Watchers and Electoral Manipulation

How do parties protect themselves from electoral manipulation? To answer this question, we study the drivers of polling station party representatives’ presence and their impact on electoral outcomes in an environment where electoral irregularities are common. Using election data from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, we find a robust positive correlation between the presence of party representatives and that party’s vote share. The evidence suggests that this correlation can be attributed to party representatives influencing the electoral results. We also formulate a game theoretic model of the levels of representation chosen by parties in a given precinct and structurally estimate its parameters. We find that parties send their representatives where they expect their opponents to send their own. The finding suggests representatives play a primarily protective role, even when they are often involved in irregularities themselves.
Subjective Risk Assessment and Perception in the Greek and English Bakery Industries

Several factors influencing risk perception in the area of occupational health and safety are known, but there is still lack of a full understanding of the ways in which people characterize risk. This study aimed to provide an insight of employee risk assessment and perception in the bakery industry. 87 British and 64 Greek employees in two comparable bakery companies were asked to estimate and evaluate hazards at their workplace. The participants' judgments of 12 hazards—according to 7 risk aspects—were collected and analyzed. Subjective assessment on important occupational hazards included handling heavy loads, repetitiveness, high temperatures, high rate of work, stressful deadlines, and noise. Although limited in the population involved, our findings revealed strong cross-national differences in employee risk perception of specific groups of hazards in the bakery industry. Additional interviews revealed evidence that Greek employees' risk perception depends mostly on work experience while British employees were aware of risks due to company health and safety policy, recognizing that safety is the responsibility of both the management and the worker. Cross-national (cultural) factors that influence workforce risk perception and attitudes towards safety have to be taken into account by technical experts and policy makers in the designing of prevention strategies and risk communication.
Magnetic field strength distribution in interplanetary turbulence

The distribution of magnetic field magnitudes is derived for the special case of a constant mean field and uncorrelated components having Gaussian distributions. Of the three cases considered (isotropic, transverse, and axisymmetric) the latter most closely resembles a lognormal distribution when the parallel variance is less than the perpendicular variance. Thus a normally distributed, nonintermittent vector field can produce a magnitude distribution that closely resembles a functional form often associated with models of intermittency. This result is illustrated by comparison with a magnetic field magnitude distribution computed from the 1 AU Omni dataset. The parameters of the Gaussian component magnitude distribution can be chosen to compare with the data which is also well fit as a lognormal type. We conclude that the magnitude distribution may not be a sensitive indicator of intermittency and that further examination of the sensitivity of such indicators is warranted.
Optimal quarantine and isolation strategies in epidemics control

In the absence of valid medicines or vaccine, quarantine and isolation strategies are the most important and effective measures against the SARS outbreaks. This paper discusses the application of the optimal and sub-optimal control for SARS outbreak control via the Pontryagin's Maximum Principle and ge- netic algorithm, respectively. To this end, a pair of control variables representing the quarantine and isolation strategies is incorporated into our improved SARS transmission model. The simulation results demonstrate that the maximum implementation of quarantining and isolation strategies in the early stage of the epidemic are of very critical impacts in the both cases of optimal and sub-optimal control. This gives a theoretical inter- pretation to the practical experiences that the early quarantine and isolation strategies are critically important to control the outbreaks of epidemics. Furthermore, our results also show that the proposed sub-optimal con- trol can lead to performances close to the optimal control, but with much simpler strategies for long periods of time in practical use.
Renormalization of fluctuating tilted hexatic membranes

We consider the tilted hexatic Hamiltonian on the fluctuating membranes. A renormalization-group analysis leads us to find three critical regions; two correspond to the strong coupling regimes of the gradient cross coupling where we find the (anti)locked tilted hexatic to liquid phase transition, the other to the weak coupling regime where we find four phases; the unlocked tilted hexatic phase, the hexatic phase, the tilted phase, and the liquid phase. The crinkled-to-crumpled transition of the fluctuating tilted hexatic membranes is also described.
Automated lung CT image segmentation using kernel mean shift analysis

With improvement technology in medical science, using methods based on machine vision technics become more considerable. Automatic methods in clinical practice provide fast and accurate analysis of scanned images indisease diagnosing. Within these methods, medical image segmentation plays more important role in separation of defective cellular from healthy organs. By performing an accurate segmentation, medicines can detect indistinguishable parts of scanned images, classify them and search over a database to find similar cases. In this paper; we proposed an efficient and adaptive method for segmentation of lung CT images. The proposed algorithm uses adaptive mean shift method that estimate the bandwidth parameter by using fixed bandwidth estimation. Because of close dependency of kernel density estimation method to the bandwidth parameter, Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is used to optimize this parameter. This method is achieved better segmentation that can carry out small lung nodules and detecting regions within an CT image. Experimental results on a large dataset of diverse lung CT images prove that the proposed algorithm accurately and efficiently detects the borders and regions of lung images.
Fundamental Conditions for the Evolution of Altruism: Towards a Unification of Theories

An abstract o f the dissertation o f Jeffrey Alan Fletcher for the Doctor o f Philosophy in Systems Science presented M ay 6, 2004. Title: Fundamental Conditions for the Evolution o f Altruism: Towards a Unification o f Theories In evolutionary theory the existence o f self-sacrificing cooperative traits poses a problem that has engendered decades o f debate. The principal theories o f the evolution o f altruism are inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, and multilevel selection. To provide a framework for the unification o f these apparently disparate theories, this dissertation identifies two fundamental conditions required for the evolution o f altruism: 1) non-zero-sum fitness benefits for cooperation and 2) positive assortment among altruistic behaviors. I demonstrate the underlying similarities in these three theories in the following two ways. First, I show that the game-theoretic model o f the prisoner’s dilemma (PD) is inherent to all three theories. While the PD has been used extensively to model reciprocal altruism, I demonstrate that the n-player PD captures fundamental aspects o f multilevel selection and inclusive fitness in that NPD model parameters relate simply to Simpson’s paradox, the Price covariance equation, and Ham ilton’s rule. The tension between hierarchical levels that defines a PD reflects the tension between
Xenotransplantation of human ovarian tissue to nude mice: comparison between four grafting sites.

BACKGROUND This study was designed to assess the impact of different ovarian tissue transplantation sites on the follicular pool and ovarian tissue integrity after short-term grafting, since there is no consensus in the literature as to the optimal grafting site in experimental models. METHODS Frozen-thawed ovarian tissue from eight patients was grafted for 1 or 3 weeks to the peritoneum, inside the ovarian bursa, under the skin and into the muscle of 16 nude mice. Assessment of follicular density and follicle classification was carried out by histological analysis. Proliferative activity was evidenced by immunostaining with anti-Ki-67 antibodies, and fibrotic areas were analyzed by morphometry on histological slides. RESULTS One week post-transplantation, the proportion of Ki-67-positive primordial follicles was higher (20-42%) than in controls (1.7%), demonstrating follicular activation in all four sites. Despite this activation, primordial follicles were still found 3 weeks post-grafting, (34.1-66.9% of the follicle population), most of them quiescent, as indicated by the absence of Ki-67 immunostaining. Cryopreservation and grafting resulted in extensive fibrosis in the stroma. This fibrosis was significantly less pronounced in intramuscular (IM) grafts, representing 18.8% of the surface versus 44.7-60.5% for other sites, after 3 weeks of grafting. CONCLUSIONS All four grafting sites equally supported early follicular growth and preserved some quiescent follicles after short-term frozen-thawed human ovarian tissue transplantation. The extensive fibrosis observed does not appear to have a major impact on early follicle development, but its long-term effects must be investigated. The graft environment may be implicated in the preservation of the stroma, as suggested by a lower degree of fibrosis in the IM site.
A Scalable and Reconfigurable Shared-Memory Graphics Cluster Architecture

If the computational demands of an interactive graphics rendering application cannot be met by a single commodity Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), multiple graphics accelerators may be utilised on multi-GPU based systems such as SLI [1] or Crossfire [2] or by a cluster of PCs in conjunction with a software infrastructure. Typically these PC cluster solutions allow the application programmer to use a standard OpenGL API. In this paper we describe an FPGA based hardware architecture, which provides an interface for multiple commodity graphics accelerators. Our scalable parallel rendering architecture aims to accelerate graphics applications using a tightly coupled hybrid system of parallel commodity GPUs and reconfigurable hardware [3], while providing similar services to the above mentioned approach. This is work in progress. So far, we have designed and manufactured the required custom-hardware. Currently, we are focussing on implementing the shared-memory subsystem.
A mutation affecting basal body duplication and cell shape in Paramecium [published erratum appears in J Cell Biol 1987 Jun;104(6):1755]

The thermosensitive mutant sm19 of Paramecium tetraurelia undergoes a progressive reduction in cell length and basal body number over successive divisions at the nonpermissive temperature of 35 degrees C. In spite of these defects, sm19 cells retain the same generation time as wild-type cells at 35 degrees C. Cytological observations at both electron and light microscopy levels reveal no other perturbation than the rarefaction of basal bodies and the rare (3%) absence of one or two microtubules in basal bodies or ciliary axonemes. The temperature- sensitive period, during the last 30 min of the cell cycle, corresponds to the phase of basal body duplication. Upon transfer back to the permissive temperature, all basal bodies are normally duplicated. The mutational defect is transiently restored by microinjection of wild- type cytoplasm or of a soluble proteic fraction from wild-type cell homogenates. Altogether, the cytological and physiological data support the conclusion that the sm19+ gene codes for a diffusible product required for the initiation of basal body duplication and would thus be the first identified gene involved in this process. Our data also indicate that in Paramecium basal body number is not coupled with control of the cell cycle, but helps determine the shape of the cell via the organization of the cytoskeleton.
Finite element simulations of the active stress in the imaginal disc of the Drosophila Melanogaster

During the larval stages of development, the imaginal disc of Drosphila Melanogaster is composed by a monolayer of epithelial cells, which undergo a strain actively produced by the cells themselves. The well-organized collective contraction produces a stress field that seemingly has a double morphogenetic role: it orchestrates the cellular organization towards the macroscopic shape emergence while simultaneously providing a local information on the organ size. Here we perform numerical simulations of such a mechanical control on morphogenesis at a continuum level, using a three-dimensional finite model that accounts for the active cell contraction. The numerical model is able to reproduce the (few) known qualitative characteristics of the tensional patterns within the imaginal disc of the fruit fly. The computed stress components slightly deviate from planarity, thus confirming the previous theoretical assumptions of a nonlinear elastic analytical model, and enforcing the hypothesis that the spatial variation of the mechanical stress may act as a size regulating signal that locally scales with the global dimension of the domain.
Land Use/Cover Response to Rainfall Variability: A Comparing Analysis between NDVI and EVI in the Southwest of Burkina Faso

A comparative analysis of the sensitivity of NDVI and EVI to rainfall indicators has been carried out for different land use/covers in the Southwest of Burkina Faso. Three classified land use/covers maps for 1999, 2006 and 2011 were produced and change detection was applied to locate persistent areas. Thereafter monthly vegetation indices of plots of 750 × 750 m2 were extracted from 2001 to 2011 for persistent woodland, mixed vegetation, and agricultural area within 5 km radius around four rain gauges. Furthermore, correlation analysis to measure the relationship between vegetation indices and rainfall indicators was performed. The results indicate some similarities between NDVI and EVI. Both indices, for all land use/covers, showed significant and strong positive correlation with the rainfall indicators. In general, NDVI was more sensitive to rainfall than EVI in the study area, but the difference between the Pearson’s coefficient values of both vegetation indices was insignificant. The findings of this work agree with some previous studies, but contrasting conclusions were also noted in literature. Hence wider spatial investigation will be necessary to confirm the results of this paper.
Evaluation of fetal cerebral blood flow perfusion using power Doppler ultrasound angiography (3D-PDA) in growth-restricted fetuses

Objective: to explore the potential of 3D Power Doppler Angiography (3D PDA) to evaluate the cerebral circulation in normal and growth restricted fetuses (IUGR). Study design: in a pilot study, we enrolled 51 appropriate for gestational age (AGA) pregnancies and 17 singleton pregnancies presenting IUGR, all between 22 and 38 weeks of gestation. Using 3D power Doppler ultrasound, a volume acquisition of the fetal brain was performed. Two regions of interest (ROI) were defined within the fetal brain. Zone 1 is anterior to the cavum septi pellucidi (CSP). Zone 2 is defined by a rectangle obtained tracing a contour between the temporal bones as wide as the CSP, corresponding to the area of the middle cerebral artery. The Flow Index (FI), the Vascularization Index (VI), the Vascularization and Flow Index (VFI) were determined in both areas in both IUGR and AGA fetuses by a single operator. IUGR fetuses were divided into three groups: Group 1, with normal pulsatility index (PI) of umbilical artery (UA), middle cerebral artery (MCA) and ductus venosus (DV); Group 2, IUGR fetuses with abnormal UA PI, normal MCA PI, normal DV PI; in Group 3, IUGR fetuses with abnormal UA PI, MCA PI and DV PI. Results: FI and VFI values of zone 1 were increased in Group 1.Values of VFI in zone 2 were increased in Group 2. Conclusions: Our findings are in line with recent studies in growth-restricted fetuses suggesting that the anterior cerebral artery shows Doppler signs of vasodilatation before these are observed in the MCA, demonstrating the “frontal brain sparing effect”.
A Novel Endocytic Recycling Signal That Distinguishes the Membrane Trafficking of Naturally Occurring Opioid Receptors*

δ and μ opioid receptors are homologous G protein-coupled receptors that are differentially sorted between divergent degradative and recycling membrane pathways following agonist-induced endocytosis. Whereas δ opioid receptors are selectively sorted to lysosomes, μ opioid receptors recycle rapidly to the plasma membrane by a process that has been proposed to occur via bulk membrane flow. We have observed that μ opioid receptors do not recycle by default and have defined a specific sequence present in the cytoplasmic tail of the cloned μ opioid receptor that is both necessary and sufficient for rapid recycling of internalized receptors. This sequence is completely distinct from a sequence shown previously to be required for recycling of the β2 adrenergic receptor yet is functionally interchangeable when tested in chimeric mutant receptors. These results indicate that signal-dependent recycling is a more common property of G protein-coupled receptors than previously appreciated and demonstrate that such a modular recycling signal distinguishes the regulation of homologous receptors that are naturally co-expressed.
Highly expressed proteins prefer less informative amino acids

The transcriptional and translational systems are essentially information processing systems. However, how to quantify the amount of information decoded during expression remains a mystery. Here, we have proposed a simple method to evaluate the amount of information transcribed and translated during gene expression. We found that although proteins with a high copy number have more information translated, the average number of bits per amino acid is not high. The negative correlation between protein copy number and bits per amino acid indicates the selective pressure to reduce translational errors. Moreover, interacting proteins have similar bits per residue translated. All of these findings highlight the importance of understanding transcription and translation from an information processing perspective.
An Efficient Approach to Generating Location-Sensitive Recommendations in Ad-hoc Social Network Environments

Social recommendation has been popular and successful in various urban sustainable applications such as online sharing, products recommendation and shopping services. These applications allow users to form several implicit social networks through their daily social interactions. The users in such social networks can rate some interesting items and give comments. The majority of the existing studies have investigated the rating prediction and recommendation of items based on user-item bipartite graph and user-user social graph, so called social recommendation. However, the spatial factor was not considered in their recommendation mechanisms. With the rapid development of the service of location-based social networks, the spatial information gradually affects the quality and correlation of rating and recommendation of items. This paper proposes spatial social union (SSU), an approach of similarity measurement between two users that integrates the interconnection among users, items and locations. The SSU-aware location-sensitive recommendation algorithm is then devised. We evaluate and compare the proposed approach with the existing rating prediction and item recommendation algorithms subject to a real-life data set. Experimental results show that the proposed SSU-aware recommendation algorithm is more effective in recommending items with the better consideration of user's preference and location.