Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Composable Model for Analyzing Locality of Multi-threaded Programs

In a multi-threaded execution, threads may negatively interfere when their private data contends for shared cache or positively interact when the data brought in by one thread is used by other threads. This paper presents a model of such cache behavior to predict locality without exhaustive simulation and provide insight into trends. The new model extends prior work that assumes no data sharing and uniform thread interleaving. Based on a single pass over an interleaved execution trace, we compute a set of per-thread statistics that includes the effect of thread interleaving and data sharing. The per-thread statistics is then composed to predict performance for all cache sizes, either for sub-clusters of threads or for futuristic environments with a larger number of similar threads. We evaluate and validate our model against exhaustive simulation using a server application running on a quad-core machine and productivity, multimedia and gaming applications running on a dual-core machine. The results indicate that our model is accurate and relies on incorporating both irregular thread interleaving and data sharing to achieve this accuracy. In addition, it identifies and separates individual factors affecting locality and scalability and hence opens new possibilities in performance tuning, program scheduling, and hardware cache design for concurrent applications.
Trade liberalisation and export demand function: the case of South Asia.

A large number of studies have estimated export price and income elasticities for many different countries utilising various econometrics techniques. This paper seeks to add to this literature by estimating export demand elasticities of selected South Asian countries, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal by using cointegration and error correction methods. The study attempts to find if the sample countries share the same features in their export demand function after their trade reforms. The income elasticity varies considerably among the sample countries ranging from 0.17 to 4.23 in the long run and from 0.79 to 3.61 in the short run. Price elasticity estimates for all sample countries are inelastic, varying from 0.17 to 0.5 in the long run and from 0.13 to 0.78 in the short run.
Extending Human Hematopoietic Stem Cell Survival In Vitro with Adipocytes

Abstract Human hematopoietic stem cells (hHSCs) cannot be maintained in vitro for extended time periods because they rapidly differentiate or die. To extend in vitro culture time, researchers have made attempts to use human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) to create feeder layers that mimic the stem cell niche. We have conducted an array of experiments including adipocytes in these feeder layers that inhibit hHSC differentiation and by that prolong stem cell survival in vitro. The amount of CD34+ cells was quantified using flow cytometry. In a first experiment, feeder layers of undifferentiated hMSCs were compared with feeder layers differentiated toward osteoblasts or adipocytes using minimal medium, showing the highest survival rate where adipocytes were included. The same conclusion was drawn in a second experiment in comparing hMSCs with adipogenic feeder cells, using a culture medium supplemented with a cocktail of hHSC growth factors. In a third experiment, it was shown that direct cell–cell contact is necessary for the supportive effect of the feeder layers. In a fourth and fifth experiment the amount of adipocytes in the feeder layers were varied, and in all experiments a higher amount of adipocytes in the feeder layers showed a less rapid decay of CD34+ cells at later time points. We therefore concluded that adipocytes assist in suppressing hHSC differentiation and aid in prolonging their survival in vitro.
Evaluating a pen-based computer interface for novice older users

Nowadays, few efforts have been dedicated to the design of specialized graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for elderly people despite the fact that they have computer interaction problems with the WIMP standard (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers). This research goes one step further, proposing and evaluating a penbased interaction technique based on to draw simple lines that improves the computer usability for novice older users.
Genome-Wide Survey and Expression Profile Analysis of the Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) Gene Family in Brassica rapa

Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades are fundamental signal transduction modules in plants, controlling cell division, development, hormone signaling, and biotic and abiotic stress responses. Although MAPKs have been investigated in several plant species, a comprehensive analysis of the MAPK gene family has hitherto not been performed in Brassica rapa. In this study, we identified 32 MAPKs in the B. rapa genome by conducting BLASTP and syntenic block analyses, and screening for the essential signature motif (TDY or TEY) of plant MAPK proteins. Of the 32 BraMAPK genes retrieved from the Brassica Database, 13 exhibited exon splicing errors, excessive splicing of the 5' sequence, excessive retention of the 5' sequence, and sequencing errors of the 3' end. Phylogenetic trees of the 32 corrected MAPKs from B. rapa and of MAPKs from other plants generated by the neighbor-joining and maximum likelihood methods suggested that BraMAPKs could be divided into four groups (groups A, B, C, and D). Gene number expansion was observed for BraMAPK genes in groups A and D, which may have been caused by the tandem duplication and genome triplication of the ancestral genome of the Brassica progenitor. Except for five members of the BraMAPK10 subfamily, the identified BraMAPKs were expressed in most of the tissues examined, including callus, root, stem, leaf, flower, and silique. Quantitative real-time PCR demonstrated that at least six and five BraMAPKs were induced or repressed by various abiotic stresses and hormone treatments, respectively, suggesting their potential roles in the abiotic stress response and various hormone signal transduction pathways in B. rapa. This study provides valuable insight into the putative physiological and biochemical functions of MAPK genes in B. rapa.
THE IMPACT OF SAVINGS MOBILIZATION ON CREDIT RATIONING: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM JAMAICA / L'INFLUENCE DE LA MOBILISATION D'ÉPARGNE SUR LE RATIONNEMENT DE CRÉDIT: PREUVE EMPIRIQUE DE JAMAIQUE

Utilizing individual financial records of five hundred and eighty-four clients at forty-two People's Cooperative Banks in Jamaica, together with a theoretically plausible model that incorporated credit rationing and financial intermediation in the demand for saving deposits by banks and the supply of saving deposits by surplus households, this study confirmed that saving mobilization reduces credit rationing and expands credit access, as better loan decisions can be made with improved client information. In addition, controlling inflation and offering attractive, real positive interest rates on deposits are integral to the process of reducing donor and government dependency in rural financial markets. While inflation shrinks financial intermediation, it is difficult to obtain empirical evidence of this outcome when the demand and supply of savings are not considered and aggregate data, which suppresses individual preferences, are utilized. Finally, evidence in this study show that female borrowers had less formal saving deposits than male borrowers. Females were also more intensely rationed than their male counterparts, reflecting perhaps cultural norms which do not easily integrate women into the formal financial system. L'INFLUENCE DE LA MOBILISATION D'EPARGNE SUR LE RATIONNEMENT DE CREDIT: PREUVE EMPIRIQUE DE JAMAIQUE
Re-Emergent Inhibition of Cochlear Inner Hair Cells in a Mouse Model of Hearing Loss

Hearing loss among the elderly correlates with diminished social, mental, and physical health. Age-related cochlear cell death does occur, but growing anatomical evidence suggests that synaptic rearrangements on sensory hair cells also contribute to auditory functional decline. Here we present voltage-clamp recordings from inner hair cells of the C57BL/6J mouse model of age-related hearing loss, which reveal that cholinergic synaptic inputs re-emerge during aging. These efferents are functionally inhibitory, using the same ionic mechanisms as do efferent contacts present transiently before the developmental onset of hearing. The strength of efferent inhibition of inner hair cells increases with hearing threshold elevation. These data indicate that the aged cochlea regains features of the developing cochlea and that efferent inhibition of the primary receptors of the auditory system re-emerges with hearing impairment. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Synaptic changes in the auditory periphery are increasingly recognized as important factors in hearing loss. To date, anatomical work has described the loss of afferent contacts from cochlear hair cells. However, relatively little is known about the efferent innervation of the cochlea during hearing loss. We performed intracellular recordings from mouse inner hair cells across the lifespan and show that efferent innervation of inner hair cells arises in parallel with the loss of afferent contacts and elevated hearing threshold during aging. These efferent neurons inhibit inner hair cells, raising the possibility that they play a role in the progression of age-related hearing loss.
Detecting the influence of land use changes on discharges and floods in the Meuse River Basin – the predictive power of a ninety-year rainfall-runoff relation?

Abstract. Quantifying how changes in land use affect the hydrological response at the river basin scale is a current challenge in hydrological science. A daily discharge record (1911–2000) of the river Meuse (21 000 km2; Western Europe) has been simulated with a semi-distributed conceptual model (HBV). The model has been calibrated and validated with a data set for the period 1968–1998. In this study the performance of the model for the period prior to 1968 has been analysed. The observed and simulated discharge records are compared in terms of annual average discharge, summer and winter average discharge, annual maximum daily discharge, and annual maximum 10-day average discharge. The results are discussed with reference to land use change (i.e. forest type change) and shortcomings of the available precipitation and discharge records. The general agreement between the observed and simulated discharge records is good (Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency: 0.89–0.93), in particular flood volumes and the highest flood peaks are simulated well but the model has problems with the medium floods (shape and peak value). However, there are some systematic deviations between the observed and simulated discharges during specific periods. The simulation result could somewhat be improved by taking the historical land use into consideration. But the systematic overestimation of the discharge for the period 1933–1968 could not be attributed to observed changes in land use. It is concluded that the overall impact of land use changes in the Meuse basin is too small to be detected given the uncertainties in the available records.
Differential Infectivity by the Oral Route of Trypanosoma cruzi Lineages Derived from Y Strain

Background Diversity of T. cruzi strains is a central problem in Chagas disease research because of its correlation with the wide range of clinical manifestations and the biogeographical parasite distribution. The role played by parasite microdiversity in Chagas disease epidemiology is still debatable. Also awaits clarification whether such diversity is associated with the outcome of oral T. cruzi infection, responsible for frequent outbreaks of acute Chagas disease. Methods and Findings We addressed the impact of microdiversity in oral T. cruzi infection, by comparative analysis of two strains, Y30 and Y82, both derived from Y strain, a widely used experimental model. Network genealogies of four nuclear genes (SSU rDNA, actin, DHFR-TS, EF1α) revealed that Y30 is closely related to Discrete Typing Unit TcII while Y82 is more closely related to TcVI, a group containing hybrid strains. Nevertheless, excepting one A-G transition at position 1463, Y30 and Y82 SSU rDNAs were identical. Y82 strain, expressing the surface molecule gp82, infected mice orally more efficiently than Y30, which expresses a related gp30 molecule. Both molecules are involved in lysosome exocytosis-dependent host cell invasion, but exhibit differential gastric mucin-binding capacity, a property critical for parasite migration toward the gastric mucosal epithelium. Upon oral infection of mice, the number of Y30 and Y82 parasites in gastric epithelial cells differed widely. Conclusions We conclude that metacyclic forms of gp82-expressing Y82 strain, closely related to TcVI, are better adapted than Y30 strain (TcII) to traverse the stomach mucous layer and establish oral route infection. The efficiency to infect target cell is the same because gp82 and gp30 strains have similar invasion-promoting properties. Unknown is whether differences in Y30 and Y82 are natural parasite adaptations or a product of lab-induced evolution by differential selection along the 60 years elapsed since the Y strain isolation.
Iterative learning of Fisher linear discriminants for handwritten digit recognition

This paper studies the iterative learning of Fisher linear discriminants (FLDs) for handwritten digit recognition. We present an epoch-limited iterative learning strategy to update the weight vectors and thresholds on condition that the error rates for the current training subsets come down. The within-class scatter matrices being or approximately singular should be moderately reduced in dimensionality but not added with tiny perturbations. We suggest that the thresholds be given by the mean-projected midpoints but not by the least-mean-squared points. Combining the ideas together, this paper proposes a type of integrated FLDs. The experimental results over the MNIST and USPS handwritten digits have demonstrated that the integrated FLDs have obvious advantages over conventional FLDs in the aspects of learning and generalization performances.
Distortion Evaluation of RF Power Amplifiers Using Dynamic Deviation Reduction Based Volterra Series

In this paper, we present a systematic way to evaluate nonlinear distortions induced by RF power amplifiers. This approach is derived from a previously-introduced dynamic deviation reduction based Volterra series, in which static nonlinearities and different orders of dynamic behavior can be separately identified. New figures of merit are introduced to evaluate the effects of different order dynamics upon the model accuracy and the performance of PA linearizers, which provides a judicious way to trade off between model complexity and model accuracy.
Domain-Specific Sense Distributions and Predominant Sense Acquisition

Distributions of the senses of words are often highly skewed. This fact is exploited by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems which back off to the predominant sense of a word when contextual clues are not strong enough. The domain of a document has a strong influence on the sense distribution of words, but it is not feasible to produce large manually annotated corpora for every domain of interest. In this paper we describe the construction of three sense annotated corpora in different domains for a sample of English words. We apply an existing method for acquiring predominant sense information automatically from raw text, and for our sample demonstrate that (1) acquiring such information automatically from a mixed-domain corpus is more accurate than deriving it from SemCor, and (2) acquiring it automatically from text in the same domain as the target domain performs best by a large margin. We also show that for an all words WSD task this automatic method is best focussed on words that are salient to the domain, and on words with a different acquired predominant sense in that domain compared to that acquired from a balanced corpus.
Exposure to Conflict and Violence Across Contexts: Relations to Adjustment Among Palestinian Children

Despite extensive literatures on the impact on children of exposure to violence in families, neighborhoods, and peer groups, there has been relatively little effort evaluating their cumulative impact. There also has been less attention to the effects of exposure to political conflict and violence. We collected data from a representative sample of 600 Palestinian youths (3 age cohorts: 8, 11, and 14 years old) to evaluate the relation of exposure to political conflict and violence, and violence in the family, community, and school, to posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms and aggressive behavior. Results highlight the additive effects of exposure to political conflict and violence, suggesting that interventionists should consider the full spectrum of sources of environmental risk for PTS symptoms and aggressive behavior.
A novel approach to generate up-sampled tomographic images using combination of rotated hexagonal lattices

Generation of upsampled tomographic images via combination of rotated lattices has been explored in [1]. In this paper, we evaluate the existing method using real phantom data. Up-sampled tomographic images are generated via combination of rotated hexagonal lattices. Sinogram data is filtered and back-projected on two hexagonal lattices which are rotated versions of each other. Samples from these lattices are interpolated to generate an up-sampled image defined on a square lattice. These results are compared with direct up-sampling method and image ISR-2 algorithm described in [10]. Two PET phantoms — NEMA and Hoffman brain phantom are used for purpose of evaluation. The results of the proposed method show considerable improvement over direct up-sampled image in terms of contrast, sharpness and imaging artifact; but when compared with ISR-2 generated image, the difference in image quality is not significant. A key advantage of the proposed method is that only two images are required for generating a high resolution image whereas ISR-2 requires k low resolution images for an up-sampling factor of k.
Integrins Control Dendritic Spine Plasticity in Hippocampal Neurons through NMDA Receptor and Ca2+/Calmodulin-Dependent Protein Kinase II-Mediated Actin Reorganization

The formation of dendritic spines during development and their structural plasticity in the adult brain are critical aspects of synaptogenesis and synaptic plasticity. Many different factors and proteins have been shown to control dendritic spine development and remodeling (Ethell and Pasquale, 2005). The extracellular matrix (ECM) components and their cell surface receptors, integrins, have been found in the vicinity of synapses and shown to regulate synaptic efficacy and play an important role in long-term potentiation (Bahr et al., 1997; Chavis and Westbrook, 2001; Chan et al., 2003; Lin et al., 2003; Bernard-Trifilo et al., 2005). Although molecular mechanisms by which integrins affect synaptic efficacy have begun to emerge, their role in structural plasticity is poorly understood. Here, we show that integrins are involved in spine remodeling in cultured hippocampal neurons. The treatment of 14 d in vitro hippocampal neurons with arginine–glycine–aspartate (RGD)-containing peptide, an established integrin ligand, induced elongation of existing dendritic spines and promoted formation of new filopodia. These effects were also accompanied by integrin-dependent actin reorganization and synapse remodeling, which were partially inhibited by function-blocking antibodies against β1 and β3 integrins. This actin reorganization was blocked with the NMDA receptor (NMDAR) antagonist MK801 [(+)-5-methyl-10,11-dihydro-5H-dibenzo[a,d]cyclohepten-5,10-imine hydrogen maleate]. The Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) inhibitor KN93 (N-[2-[N-(4-chlorocinnamyl)-N-methylaminomethyl]phenyl]-N-(2-hydroxyethyl)-4-methoxybenzenesulfonamide) also suppressed RGD-induced actin reorganization and synapse remodeling. Our findings show that integrins control ECM-mediated spine remodeling in hippocampal neurons through NMDAR/CaMKII-dependent actin reorganization.
Integration and control of heterogeneous power sources in meshed distribution grids

With the advent of low-voltage microgrids, wind farms and photovoltaic power stations, the management of medium-voltage distribution grids must face new challenges, since uncoordinated operation of the various power sources may cause excess power flows, under- and over-voltages, unwanted tripping of protections, and unexpected distribution losses. This paper proposes a general and scalable approach to the integrated control of distributed power sources in meshed distribution grids. The main goal is to minimize the power losses and the voltage deviations at grid nodes, by taking advantage of all the controllable entities.
Formalization of Information-Theoretic Security for Encryption and Key Agreement, Revisited

In this paper, we revisit formalizations of information-theoretic security for symmetric-key encryption and key agreement protocols which are very fundamental primitives in cryptography. In general, we can formalize information-theoretic security in various ways: some of them can be formalized as stand-alone security by extending (or relaxing) Shannon’s perfect secrecy; some of them can be done based on composable security. Then, a natural question about this is: what is the gap between the formalizations? To answer the question, we investigate relationships between several formalizations of information-theoretic security for symmetric-key encryption and key agreement protocols. Specifically, for symmetric-key encryption protocols which may have decryption-errors, we deal with the following formalizations of security: formalizations extended (or relaxed) from Shannon’s perfect secrecy by using mutual information and statistical distance; information-theoretic analogue of indistinguishability by Goldwasser and Micali; and the ones of composable security by Maurer et al. and Canetti. Then, we explicitly show that those formalizations are essentially equivalent under both one-time and multiple-use models. Under the both models, we also derive lower bounds on the adversary’s (or distinguisher’s) advantage and secret-key size required under all of the above formalizations. Although some of them may be already known, we can explicitly derive them all at once through our relationships between the formalizations. In addition, we briefly observe impossibility results which easily follow from the lower bounds. The similar results are also shown for key agreement protocols which may have agreement-errors.