Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the Memory Communication Traffic in a Hierarchical Cache Model for Massively-Manycore Processors

The scaling of semiconductor technologies is leading to processors with increasing numbers of cores. A key enabler in manycore systems is the use of Networks-on-Chip (NoC) as a global communication mechanism. The adoption of NoCs in manycore systems requires a shift in focus from computation to communication, as communication is fast becoming the dominant factor in processor performance. Many researchers have focused on direct communication between cores in the NoC, however in a manycore processor the communication is actually between the cores and the memory hierarchy. In this work, we investigate the memory communication traffic of shared threads in a hierarchical cache architecture. We argue that the performance scalability for shared-memory applications in a hierarchical cache architecture for systems with thousands of processor cores depends on the distance between threads sharing memory in terms of the cache hierarchy (the "memory distance"). We present latency and throughput results comparing fat quadtree, concentrated mesh and mesh topologies as a function of the "memory distance" between the threads. Our results using the ITRS physical data for 2023 show that the model of thread placement and the distance of placing them significantly affects the NoC performance, and that scale-invariant topologies perform better than flat topologies.
The Broad Fe K-Line Profile in NGC 4151

We present an analysis of the Fe K-line profile of NGC 4151 by using long ASCA observation data obtained in 1995 May. The unprecedented good data quality, which is much better in the energy band around 6.4 keV than that of the famous 4.2 day ASCA observation of MCG -6-30-15 in 1994 July, offers a unique opportunity to study the details of Fe K-line profile. Apart from those characteristics already noticed in earlier ASCA observations on this object (Yaqoob et al.; a broad and skewed profile with a strong peak at about 6.4 keV and a large red wing extending to ~4-5 keV), which is remarkably similar to that of MCG -6-30-15, we also find a weak blue wing extending to about 8 keV, thanks to the good quality of the data. When fitted by a relativistic accretion disk line plus a narrow core at 6.4 keV, the data constrain the accretion disk to be nearly face-on, contrary to the edge-on geometry inferred from optical and UV observations. However, the extended blue wing can not be well fitted even after we include corresponding Fe Kβ components. Ni Kα-line emission by an amount of 12% of Fe Kα is statistically required. An alternative explanation is a model consisting of a narrow core and two disk lines with inclinations of 58° and 0°, respectively. We suppose that the component with inclination of 58° was observed directly, consistent with its edge-on geometry, and the component with inclination of 0° was scattered into our line of sight by a Compton mirror, which might be the cool accretion disk corona proposed by Poutanen et al.
A User-centred Methodology for Designing an Online Social Network to Motivate Health Behaviour Change

Positive health behaviour is critical to preventing illness and managing chronic conditions. A user-centred methodology was employed to design an online social network to motivate health behaviour change. The methodology was augmented by utilizing the Appeal, Belonging, Commitment (ABC) Framework, which is based on theoretical models for health behaviour change and use of online social networks. The user-centred methodology included four phases: 1) initial user inquiry on health behaviour and use of online social networks; 2) interview feedback on paper prototypes; 2) laboratory study on medium fidelity prototype; and 4) a field study on the high fidelity prototype. The points of inquiry through these phases were based on the ABC Framework. This yielded an online social network system that linked to external third party databases to deploy to users via an interactive website.
Development of Autoantibodies in the TrialNet Natural History Study

OBJECTIVE Understanding the relationship between age and islet autoantibody (Ab) seroconversion can establish the optimal screening interval(s) to assess risk for type 1 diabetes, identify subjects who can participate in prevention trials, and determine associated costs. This study assessed the rates of seroconversion to glutamic acid decarboxylase positive (GAD65+), insulin positive (mIAA+), and insulinoma-associated protein 2 positive (ICA512+) in a large cohort of relatives of type 1 diabetes probands undergoing Ab rescreening in the TrialNet Natural History Study. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Of 32,845 children aged <18 years screened for Abs, 1,287 (3.9%) were GAD65+, 778 (2.4%) were mIAA+, 677 (2.1%) were ICA512+, and 31,038 were Ab-negative. Ab-negative children were offered annual rescreening up to 18 years of age. Cox regression was used to estimate the risk for GAD65, mIAA, and ICA512 seroconversion. RESULTS There were 205 children who seroconverted to GAD65+, 155 who seroconverted to mIAA+, and 53 who seroconverted to ICA512+ over 5.8 years of follow-up. The risk of mIAA (hazard ratio 0.89 [95% CI 0.85–0.92]) and GAD65 (0.96 [0.93–0.99]) seroconversion significantly decreased with increasing age (i.e., for each 1-year increase in age, the risk of seroconversion decreased by 11% [P < 0.0001] for mIAA and 4% [P = 0.04] for GAD65) across all ages. The cumulative Ab seroconversion was 2% for those <10 years of age versus 0.7% for those ≥10 years of age. CONCLUSIONS The risk of development of islet Abs declines with increasing age in type 1 diabetes relatives. These data support annual screening for children <10 years of age and one additional screening in adolescence.
Assessing the contribution of a major cycle race to host communities in South Australia

The development of major sport events in rural areas offers opportunities for local communities to engage in leisure, sport and tourism activity. While current studies investigate the impact of sport events on residents individually, little research has taken a community perspective. The purpose of this research was to explore the process of event development and the impact upon social interactions in seven rural communities in the 2012 Tour Down Under cycling race in Australia. Using grounded theory to explore community activities, interviews and focus groups with over 100 participants resulted in the development of a core category of collaboration; and five subcategories to examine the role of the event in stimulating community interaction and social capital. A model of sport event development explains the impact of the event development process on community relations in this rural context. Implications are discussed for managing the relationships between communities and event management organisations.
Assessment of achievement through portfolios and teacher-made tests

The present study attempted to establish whether portfolio assessment contributes to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' achievement and their feeling of responsibility towards monitoring their progress. A further concern of this study was to address the probable correlation between the scores of portfolio assessment and those of teacher-made tests. The subjects were 60 Iranian 16-year-old female high-school sophomores. The instruments utilized were a Nelson English Language Proficiency Test , portfolio assessment, a teacher-made achievement test and a satisfaction questionnaire. The assessment of achievement was through both teacher-made tests and portfolios for the experimental group,while it was through teacher-made tests only for the control group. Procedures were designed for preparing portfolios and a number of relevant goals were set. On the basis of these goals, grading checklists were drawn up, to be used by the raters. The portfolio contents included core and optional items, as well as written and recorded tasks, selected by the students to display their bestwork. Reflective comments on aspects of learning demonstrated by each piece of work were attached. At the end of the experiment, a teacher-made test with reasonable psychometric indexes was administered to both groups. The participants were also asked to fill in the satisfaction questionnaire to show their attitudes towards their learning experiences. The findings indicate that portfolio assessment, which was received positively by the subjects, contributed to Iranian EFL learners' achievement and their feelings of responsibility towards monitoring their progress. The portfolio assessment scores correlated significantlywith those of the teacher-made achievement test, and high inter-rater reliability was also achieved. Therefore it is concluded that portfolio assessment, as a promising testing and teaching tool for teachers in EFL classes, can be used in conjunction with teacher-made tests to provide the continuous, ongoing measurement of students' growth needed for formative evaluation and for planning instructional programmes.
pH-dependent charge equilibria between tyrosine-D and the S states in photosystem II. Estimation of relative midpoint redox potentials.

The effect of protonation events on the charge equilibrium between tyrosine-D and the water-oxidizing complex in photosystem II has been studied by time-resolved measurements of the EPR signal IIslow at room temperature. The flash-induced oxidation of YD by the water-oxidizing complex in the S2 state is a monophasic process above pH 6.5 and biphasic at lower pHs, showing a slow and a fast phase. The half-time of the slow phase increases from about 1 s at pH 8.0 to about 20 s at pH 5.0, whereas the half-time of the fast phase is pH independent (0.4-1 s). The dark reduction of YD+ was followed by measuring the decay of signal IIslow at room temperature. YD+ decays in a biphasic way on the tens of minutes to hours time scale. The minutes phase is due to the electron transfer to YD+ from the S0 state of the water-oxidizing complex. The half-time of this process increases from about 5 min at pH 8.0 to 40 min at pH 4.5. The hours phase of YD+ has a constant half-time of about 500 min between pH 4.7 and 7.2, which abruptly decreases above pH 7.2 and below pH 4.7. This phase reflects the reduction of YD+ either from the medium or by an unidentified redox component of PSII in those centers that are in the S1 state. The titration curve of the half-times for the oxidation of YD reveals a proton binding with a pK around 7.3-7.5 that retards the electron transfer from YD to the water-oxidizing complex. We propose that this monoprotic event reflects the protonation of an amino acid residue, probably histidine-190 on the D2 protein, to which YD is hydrogen bonded. The titration curves for the oxidation of YD and for the reduction of YD+ show a second proton binding with pK approximately 5.8-6.0 that accelerates the electron transfer from YD to the water-oxidizing complex and retards the process in the opposite direction. This protonation most probably affects the water-oxidizing complex. From the measured kinetic parameters, the lowest limits for the equilibrium constants between the S0YD+ and the S1YD as well as between the S1YD+ and S2YD states were estimated to be 5 and 750-1000, respectively. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
What's in a schwa? Durational and spectral analysis of natural continuous speech and diphones in Dutch

Although the schwa sound is by far the most frequent vowel in Dutch, it has up to now been phonetically the most neglected. We used an existing database of vowel sounds from focus words in spontaneous speech and in lexically the same text, read aloud by one male speaker, to analyse durational and spectral characteristics of schwas, and we compared the results with data on schwa diphones used in Dutch text-to-speech synthesis. It turned out that, contrary to what is usually thought, lexical schwa sounds in natural continuous speech are considerably shorter than other short vowels, that there is no strong consonantal influence on schwa duration, that schwa sounds display a spectral spread larger than any other vowel, and that surrounding consonants seem to play a role with respect to the midpoint formant distribution of the schwa within the whole vowel system. In no way can the schwa be considered as the ‘bench-mark’ of a speaker’s vowel system.
Mental Health Analysis Profiles (MhAPs): Netherlands

As part of a wider project on mental health in OECD countries, a series of descriptive profiles have been prepared, intended to provide descriptive, easily comprehensible, highly informative accounts of the mental health systems of OECD countries. These profiles, entitled ‘Mental Health Analysis Profiles’ (MHAPs), will be able to inform discussion and reflection and provide an introduction to and a synthesised account of mental health in a given country. Each MHAP follows the same template, and whilst the MhAPs are stand-alone profiles, loose cross-country comparison using the MhAPs is possible and encouraged. The Dutch mental health system is highly institutionalised and has a large number of psychiatric beds compared to other OECD countries. Nonetheless, government reforms have aimed at shifting the axis of the system from bed-based hospital services to more integrated mental health services and community-based services. Structural changes to the Dutch mental health system, together with recent government policies that aim to improve access to mental health services, have led to decreasing the treatment gap for mental disorders but also to increasing the expenditures associated with mental health care up until 2011.
CONSULTING COMPETENTLY IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS

This article presents personalized reactions to the special issue on Culture, Race, and Ethnicity Challenges in Organizational Consulting Psychology. The first part of the article presents the responses of 4 consulting psychologists to 4 questions. The 4 consultants, an African American woman and man and an Anglo American woman and man, were selected based on their experiences in working with consultees and client systems where diversity and multicultural factors mattered. The second part of the article identifies the common themes that emerged from their 4 narratives plus suggestions to assist consultants in better working with consultees and client systems of diverse culture, race, and ethnicity.
Adaptive Caching in the YouTube Content Distribution Network: A Revealed Preference Game-Theoretic Learning Approach

Cognitive systems are dynamical systems that adapt their behavior to achieve sophisticated outcomes in nonstationary environments. This paper considers two cognitive aspects regarding the problem of distributed caching with limited capacity in a content distribution network that serves YouTube users with multiple edge servers: first, the theory of revealed preference from microeconomics is used to estimate human utility maximization behavior. In particular, a nonparametric learning algorithm is provided to estimate the request probability of YouTube videos from past user behavior. Second, using these estimated request probabilities, the adaptive caching problem is formulated as a noncooperative repeated game in which servers autonomously decide, which videos to cache. The utility function tradesoff the placement cost for caching videos locally with the latency cost associated with delivering the video to the users from a neighboring server. The game is nonstationary as the preferences of users in each region evolve over time. We then propose an adaptive popularity-based video caching algorithm that has two timescales: The slow timescale corresponds to learning user preferences, whereas the fast timescale is a regret-matching algorithm that provides individual servers with caching prescriptions. It is shown that, if all servers follow simple regret minimization for caching, their global behavior is sophisticated-the network achieves a correlated equilibrium, which means that servers can coordinate their caching strategies in a distributed fashion as if there exists a centralized coordinating device that they all trust to follow. In the numerical examples, we use real data from YouTube to illustrate the results.
Determinants in the 5' noncoding region of poliovirus Sabin 1 RNA that influence the attenuation phenotype

A number of recombinants between the virulent Mahoney and attenuated Sabin strains of type 1 poliovirus were constructed by using infectious cDNA clones of the two strains. To identify a strong neurovirulence determinant(s) residing in the genome region upstream of nucleotide position 1122, these recombinant viruses were subjected to biological tests, including monkey neurovirulence tests. The results of the monkey neurovirulence tests suggested the important contribution of an adenine residue (Mahoney type) at position 480 to the expression of the neurovirulence phenotype of type 1 poliovirus. This nucleotide, however, had only a minor effect, if any, on viral temperature sensitivity. Monkey neurovirulence tests on the recombinant virus whose genome had a guanine residue (Sabin type) at position 480 and variants generated from this recombinant virus in the central nervous system of monkeys strongly suggested that only one nucleotide change, from adenine to guanine, was not sufficient for full expression of the attenuation phenotype encoded by this genome region. These results suggest that the expression of the attenuation phenotype depends on the highly ordered structure formed in the 5' noncoding sequence and that the formation of such a structure is possibly influenced by the nucleotide at position 480. Furthermore, in vitro biological tests performed on viruses recovered from the central nervous system of monkeys injected with a temperature-sensitive recombinant virus showing the small-plaque and d phenotypes revealed that most of the recovered viruses had even higher temperature sensitivities and that all of the recovered viruses that had acquired the large-plaque phenotype had lost the d phenotype to some extent. These results indicate that there may be an unknown selection pressure(s) in the central nervous system and that common determinants might be involved in the expression of the small-plaque and d phenotypes.
Assessment of Competence in Radiography Education

ABSTRACT An action research project concerning the development of clinical assessment procedures in radiography education investigated the views of university‐based clinical lecturers and hospital radiographers concerning the existing assessment framework. Based on the outcomes of this initial review a revised summative assessment tool was developed, including assessment of professional conduct as well as technical competence. Evaluative comment from radiographers and students on the trialling of the tool was positive, and would seem to indicate a sound basis for further development.
Prognostic significance of the frequency of primary cilia in cells of small bowel and colorectal adenocarcinoma.

PURPOSE The primary cilium is a solitary, sensory, immotile microtubule-based structure that arises from the centrosome and is projected from the surface of most human cell types. It has been hypothesized that primary cilia could serve as a tumor suppressor organelle. The objective of this pilot study was to investigate the presence and frequency of primary cilia in cells of small bowel and colorectal adenocarcinoma and to evaluate the prognostic significance of their frequency. METHODS The presence of primary cilia in cells in samples of small bowel (8 patients) and colorectal adenocarcinoma (32 patients) was evaluated. The primary cilia of cells were immunofluorescently labeled using primary monoclonal anti-acetylated agr;-tubulin antibody and cell nuclei were labeled using DAPI. RESULTS Primary cilia were identified in all examined specimens. The median frequency of primary cilia was 0.49% in cells of small bowel cancer and 0.22% in cells in colorectal cancer. Overall survival according to frequency of primary cilia in all intestinal adenocarcinomas was significantly longer in patients with higher frequency (≥ 0.187) than in patients with lower frequency of primary cilia (< 0.187) in univariate analysis (p=0.007) and also in the Cox proportional hazard model (p=0.032). Overall survival according to frequency of primary cilia in colorectal adenocarcinoma was significantly longer in patients with higher frequency (≥ 0.187) than in patients with lower frequency of primary cilia (< 0.187) (p=0.028). CONCLUSIONS The present pilot study provides the first evidence of the prognostic significance of the frequency of primary cilia in small bowel and colorectal adenocarcinoma. Because of significantly higher median frequency of primary cilia in the rare small bowel adenocarcinoma than in the frequent colorectal adenocarcinoma (p<0.001), the results of this study support a potential role for primary cilia as a biomarker in these types of cancer.
Mirtazapine in generalized social anxiety disorder: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study

This study is aimed at investigating the efficacy and tolerability of mirtazapine in a generalized social anxiety disorder. Sixty patients with generalized social anxiety disorder were randomly allocated to receive mirtazapine (30–45 mg/day) (n=30) or placebo (n=30) for 12 weeks in a double-blind study design. Primary efficacy was assessed by the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) and response to treatment was defined as a reduction of 40% on the LSAS and an improvement on the Clinical Global Impression scale of ‘much or very much improved’. An intent-to-treat analysis showed no difference between mirtazapine and placebo on the absolute LSAS scores with a mean decrease of 13.5±16.9 and 11.2±17.8 respectively, and on the number of responders, 13 and 13%, respectively. In conclusion, mirtazapine (30–45 mg/day) failed to be effective in the generalized social anxiety disorder.
The Hollowing-out of Local Democracy and the ‘Fatal Conceit’ of Governing without Government

Books Reviewed: J. Stewart (2000) The Nature of British Local Government, Basingstoke: Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-66569-4, viii, 310pp; G. Stoker (ed), (1999), The New Management of British Local Governance, Basingstoke: Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-72815-7, xxvi, 280pp; G.Stoker, (ed), (2000), The New Politics of British Local Governance, Basingstoke: Macmillan,ISBN 0-333-72818-1, xvii, 294pp.