Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hardware Verification Using Software Analyzers

Program analysis is a highly active area of research, and the capacity and precision of software analyzers is improving rapidly. We investigate the use of modern software verification tools for formal property checking of hardware given in Verilog at register-transfer level. To this end, we translate RTL Verilog into an equivalent word-level ANSI-C program, according to synthesis semantics. The property of interest is instrumented into the Cprogram as an assertion. We subsequently apply three different software verification techniques -- bounded model checking, path-based symbolic simulation and abstract interpretation -- and compare their performance to conventional methods for property verification of hardware designs at net list and register transfer level. Our experimental results indicate that speedups of more than an order of magnitude are possible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform property verification of hardware IPs given at register-transfer level using software verifiers.
CMOS circuit design for millimeter-wave applications

We have developed a 27 GHz tuned amplifier and 52.5 GHz voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) using 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS. We used LRL calibration to extract accurate S-parameters for an intrinsic transistor with a microstrip line (MSL) structure consisting of metal1 and metal6. With this technique, we obtained a 17 dB gain and 14 dBm output power at 27 GHz for the tuned amplifier. We also obtained an oscillation frequency of 52.5 GHz with phase noise of -86 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz offset. These results indicate that our proposed technique is suitable for CMOS millimeter wave design.
Explaining the Gender Gap in Unemployment Across Countries

We model a mechanism which can generate most of the gender gap in unemployment observed in most of the OECD countries. The main components of the model are moral hazard, labor market institutions, and higher home productivity of women than men. The source of moral hazard is imperfect monitoring performed by the government. Higher home productivity of women makes them more likely to reject job offers and to stay unemployed which causes higher unemployment level for women. We find that each component has a quantitatively large effect on unemployment levels.
The Pattern of Aid Giving: The Impact of Good Governance on Development Assistance

1. Introduction 2. Good Governance and its Relation to Aid 3. Overview of Existing Studies 4. Research Design 5. Aggregate Aid, Western Bilateral and Multilateral Aid 6. The Arab Donors 7. Analysis and Discussion of Results 8. Testing the Robustness of Results 9. Conclusions
MV-FT: Efficient Implementation for Matrix-Vector Multiplication on FT64 Stream Processor

In this paper, we present a detailed case study of the optimizing implementation of a fundamental scientific kernel, matrix-vector multiplication, on FT64, which is the first 64-bit stream processor designed for scientific computing. The major novelties of our study are as follows. First, we develop four stream programs according to different stream organizations, involving dot product, row product, multi-dot product and multi-row product approaches. Second the optimal strip size for partitioning the large matrix is put forward based on a practical parameter model. Finally loop unrolling and software pipelining are used to hide the communications with the computations. The experimental results show that the optimizing implementations on FT64 achieve high speedup over the corresponding Fortran programs running on Itanium 2. It is certain that matrix-vector multiplication can efficiently exploit the tremendous potential of FT64 stream processor through programming optimizations.
Sustainability Constraints versus "Optimality" versus Intertemporal Concern, and Axioms versus Data

Sustainable, sustained, or survivable development are defined here as distinct "sustainability" constraints on intertemporal distribution, in a context which ignores uncertainty, environmental, and intratemporal concerns. Such constraints are neither self-contradictory; nor redundant, for they can conflict with maximizing the present value of utility ("optimality"); nor inferior, since the axioms underlying "optimality" are ethically arbitrary and refuted by empirical psychological data. Axiomatic arguments may clarify but cannot resolve debates about intertemporal concerns. Data suggest that sustainability constraints are not respected, and that intertemporal welfare functions containing a preference for "sustained improvement" may better reflect what bodies politic mean by sustainability.
An examination of the relationship between manufacturing flexibility and firm performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the mediating role of three types of innovation (product, process, and organizational) in the relationship between manufacturing flexibility and performance.Design/methodology/approach – Building on the resource‐based view, the paper examines the indirect effects of manufacturing flexibility on organizational performance considering product, process, and organizational innovation as mediating variables. A sample of 159 Spanish firms is taken to test the proposed theoretical model through structural equations modeling using the partial least squares approach.Findings – The effect on organizational performance of adopting a flexible productive system is mediated by incorporating product, process, and organizational innovation. This paper calls for caution in defending flexible manufacturing systems as universally efficient solutions, and argues that their productivity is linked to the complementary introduction of organizational and technological innovations.Pr.
A 0.12-${\hbox{mm}}^{2} $ 2.4-GHz CMOS Inductorless High Isolation Subharmonic Mixer With Effective Current-Reuse Transconductance

In this work, the design of an inductorless, high-isolation, and high conversion gain fully differential subharmonic down-conversion mixer for 2.4-GHz wireless application is presented. A complementary current-reuse technique is adopted between the transconductance and the local oscillator (LO) switching stage to boost the conversion gain without additional power consumption in the concept of reusing the dc current of the LO switching stage. The LO switching transistors are driven by a 25% duty cycle input to further enhance the conversion gain and improve the noise-figure performance. An active balun is integrated in the design for single-balanced to differential conversion or vice-versa, along with an RC poly phase filter to generate quadrature LO signals from a differential input signal. The subharmonic mixer is fabricated in a 0.13- μm standard CMOS technology with a core chip dimension of 313 μm× 372 μm and a power consumption of 5.82 mW from a supply voltage of 1.2 V. Experimental results show a conversion gain of 13.61 dB, an input-referred third-order intercept point of -4.46 dBm, a noise figure of 20 dB, and an isolation greater than 50 dB between the LO, RF, and IF ports. The proposed inductorless subharmonic mixer has a competitive performance in size with high isolation performance and highest conversion gain in comparison to other published works.
The VLT Survey Telescope Opens to the Sky : History of a Commissioning

The Messenger 146 – December 2011 to be calculated at the net of the Chilean time). These numbers reflect the effort made by INAF to boost the ESO Public Surveys, and take into account the delays in the project. INAF was also granted a number of hours, equivalent to 28 nights at one VLT UT, to be evenly distributed over an interval of ten years and to be used exclusively for follow-up programmes for INAF–VST surveys.
Identifying the Contribution of Indigenous Knowledge in Bioprospecting for Effective Conservation Strategy 1

This paper attempts to examine the contribution of indigenous and traditional knowledge in the process of bioprospecting, and analyzes how such knowledge influences the benefits of bioprospecting. Empirical evidence suggests that (i) out of the two widely debated but dissenting hypotheses on the benefits of bioprospecting, one estimating higher values is supported and (ii) if the bioprospecting search is based on ethnobotanical information available from local people, then the value of bioprospecting benefits will be higher than those predicted by the two hypotheses. It is crucial for bioprospecting firms to design a scheme where the information as well as access to the resources can be effectively shared between the firms and the local people in the bioprospecting site.
Application of ArtificialNeural Network to Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Coronary Artery Disease in Myocardial SPECT Bull ' s-eyeImages

sis). The effects of the numbers of hidden units and learning iterations in the network on the recognition performance were examined. In our initial stage, the results show that the recognition performance of the neural network is better than that of the radiology resident but worse than that of the experienced radiologist. Our study also demonstrates that the result produced in the neural network depends on the variety of the training examples used. The preliminary study suggests that the neural network approach is useful for the computer-aided diagnosis of coronary artery diseases in myo cardial SPECT bull's-eye images.
The role of herbal medicines in treatment of urinary tract diseases

Urinary diseases have affected humankind since ancient time and can persist, with serious medical consequences, throughout the world. Additionally, the incidence of renal disorders especially kidney stones have been enhanced in western countries in the last decades, in relation with economic development. It seems that acute and chronic renal failure and lithiasis (stone formation) occurred due to both nephrolithiasis (stone formation in kidney) and urolithiasis (stone formation in ureter or bladder even both places). Nowadays, alongside synthetic drugs, herbal medicines play a prominent role in treatment and prevention of various diseases. A number of herbal medicines and remedies have been reported for its significant nephroprotective activity, which is probably due to the presence of flavonoids and other effective secondary metabolites in those medicinal plants. Furthermore, literature reveals that the extracts from the leaves and aerial parts of some plants exhibit good potentials to improve kidney damages. Actually among different kidney disorders, there are two main urologic indications for application of herbal drugs as follows (1-3): 1. Inflammatory urinary tract diseases including renal gravel and more severe types of lithiasis, in which herbal remedies mainly of kidney & bladder teas have been used. As a matter of fact, urinary tract inflammation can be treated mainly by medicinal teas that possess a diuretic activity because of the consumption of the water that is ingested by drinking the teas. Actually, in patients with urinary tract infections or stone-related (and other) inflammatory irritations of the urinary tract, increasing the output of a hypo-osmolar urine is observed to be an effective way to clear ascending bacteria, crystallization nuclei, and other inflammatory agents (2). 2. Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH), for which there are three pathogenic hypothesis as below: A. Increase in the prostatic synthesis of dihydrotestosterone (DHT) & estrogen:androgen rat io B. Elevation in the binding capacity of sex hormonebinding globulin (SHBG) C. Elevation in the levels of inflammatory mediators (prostaglandins & leukotrienes). However, in BPH, saw palmetto berries, nettle root and pumpkin seeds are widely employed (2). Among the various medicinal plants, Arctostaphylos uvaursi (Ericaceae) with chemical composition of arbutin (512%), hydroquinone and tannins (10-20%) is well known for treatment of bacterial inflammatory diseases with three gram of the dried herb, or 400-800 mg of hydroquinone 1Medicinal Plants Research Center, Faculty of Pharmacy, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2Division of Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Gotthard: Network Support for Transaction Processing

Introduction. Network latency has a significant impact on the performance of transactional storage systems. To reduce latency, systems typically rely on a cache to service readrequests closer to the client. However, caches are not effective for write-heavy workloads, which have to be processed by the storage system in order to maintain serializability. This poster presents Gotthard, a system that implements a new technique, called optimistic abort, which reduces network latency for high-contention workloads. Gotthard leverages recent advances in network data plane programmability to execute transaction processing logic directly in network devices. A switch running Gotthard examines network traffic to observe and log transaction requests. If Gotthard suspects that a transaction is likely to be aborted at the store, it aborts the transaction early by re-writing the packet header, and routing the packets back to the client. Gotthard significantly reduces the overall latency and improves the throughput for high-contention workloads. Background. As network hardware becomes increasingly programmable [4, 3], several recent systems have demonstrated the benefits of tighter integration between the network and distributed applications that run atop. These benefits include reduced application complexity [9], improved application performance [6, 11], better network utilization [10], and more responsive traffic engineering [8]. Gotthard leverages the programmable network substrate to improve performance for high-contention workloads. Gotthard is written P4 [3], allowing the switch to execute transaction processing logic. P4 provides high-level abstractions for network functionality: packets are processed by a sequence of tables; tables match header fields, and perform actions that forward, drop, or modify packets. Moreover, P4 allows for stateful operations that can read and write to memory cells called registers.
Decomposition of the Realized Rate of Return on Investment in Fixed-Income Securities

Paper presents decomposition of the realized rate of return on investment in fixed-income securities in order to identify the income/risk sources. The decomposition is accomplished applying the concept of factorization and factor analysis on treasury bonds returns. Weekly data from the interbank market in Poland for the period 30 June – 6 October, 2004 (14 weeks) are used. In the single-factor model of decomposition, the source of risk is assumed to be the change of yield-to-maturity (YTM) of the considered bond. Within the multi-factor model, decomposition is carried out by means of both the factorization concept and factor analysis. Factor analysis is undertaken as a preliminary action aimed to identify common factors of market risk that affect the realized rate of return of the examined securities. The results of factor analysis are used in the multi-factor model of decomposition. This approach allows to reduce the number of market risk factors and to investigate their influence on realized rate of returns on different fixed-income securities.
Integrating Values into Mobile Software Engineering

Today's information systems are ubiquitous and delivered through "mobile apps" installed on smartphones. However, the growth of smartphone apps has had relatively little impact on the creation of apps that offer new affordances for young people from marginalised groups. One possible determining factor for this is the specific issue of value sensitivity. It is also evident that the role of software engineering is integral to addressing issues that require inter-connection and human interactions with systems. Thus, software engineering needs to integrate research in socio-technical systems, human behaviour and social concerns when used for design of mobile device based apps. Such integration requires a renewed focus on the notion of "Value". A basic driver of human behaviour may at least in part be explained by (moral) values. Friedman defines value as: "what a person or group of people consider important in life". Values that are particularly pertinent to information systems include: ownership and property; privacy, freedom from bias, universal usability, trust, autonomy, informed consent, identity and others [2]. A notable contribution to understanding and accounting for values in the design process is the work by Friedman and her colleagues on Value Sensitive Design (VSD)[2]. Apps addressing social concerns are particularly prone to value sensitive concerns. This work proposes that mobile app systems design and current SE practice does not incorporate any theoretical perspective of value as a first class representation. In particular, apps targeted for social good need software engineering guidance as current approaches to non-functional requirements are insufficient. This paper will present the outcomes of a research study that developed and deployed a mobile app for use by young people and their caseworkers in youth offending teams in the UK youth justice domain (http://www.mayot.mdx.ac.uk). The project raised requirements on design methods to incorporate the voice of stakeholders with respect to privacy and other moral value issues. The research was conducted "in the wild" and the app was deployed and evaluated in three case study sites. Several contributions are made: we will present our app; the novel design processes; and some of our evaluation outcomes. Critically, we will expose some of the key research challenges arising from this work as we integrated value sensitive concerns into our co-design processes. We discuss the implications for mobile software engineering practice particularly in the context of non functional requirements. In doing so, we will refer to our prior published at ICSE 2015 [1] and our current work on further empirical evaluation of the app in 12 other case study organisations.
Economic Impacts of Increased Price Variability: A Case Study with Rice

This article investigates the Impacts on the rice industry of increased price variability caused by the shift from stable economic conditions and a farm policy of supply control m the sixties to more variable economic conditions and a market-oriented farm policy in the seventies, The increased price variability associated with these changes has significantly Increased marketing margins for rice These policy and economic changes reduce the probability that Texas rice producers Will remain solvent for 10 years
Studies on the winner-determination model in e-procurement based on combinatorial multi-attribute bidding and bid

Following the tendency of economy globalization and the internationalization of market, bidding and bid is becoming the major transaction method in e-procurement market. In the multi-item procurement, the single attribute of price was the only considered evaluation standard in winner determination model of combinatorial auctions in most literatures, but it could not solve the problem of multi-attribute procurement. In this paper, we provided a winner-determination model and optimization method based on combinatorial multi-attribute bidding and bid in multi-item procurement. The winner determination problem could be described as 0–1 integer programming model and solved with tabu search algorithm. And the reliability & superiority of the model is demonstrated by means of an example and the analysis of the results.
Using Fish Population Metrics to Compare the Effects of Artificial Reef Density

Artificial reefs continue to be added as habitat throughout the world, yet questions remain about how reef design affects fish diversity and abundance. In the present study, the effects of reef density were assessed for fish communities and sizes of economically valuable Lutjanus campechanus 13 km off Port Mansfield, Texas, at a reef composed of more than 4000 concrete culverts. The study spanned from May to June in 2013 and 2014, and sites sampled included natural reefs, bare areas, and varying culvert patch density categories, ranging from 1–190 culverts. Abundances of adults and species evenness of juvenile populations differed between the years. Fish communities did not significantly differ among density categories; however, highest species richness and total abundances were observed at intermediate culvert densities and at natural reefs. Whereas the abundance of L. campechanus did not differ among density categories, mean total lengths of L. campechanus were greatest at the lower density. Our findings suggest that reefs should be deployed with intermediate patch density of 71–120 culverts in a 30-m radius to yield the highest fish abundances.
THE APPLICABILITY OF THE SECTORAL SHIFT HYPOTHESIS IN THE NETHERLANDS

The sectoral shift hypothesis in the Netherlands cannot be easily tested for the presence of rigorous structural breaks in the data. Therefore, a Kalman Filter approach is adopted. What we find, is that the variables capturing the sectoral shift hypothesis are the most important in explaining Dutch unemployment behavior during the postwar period. This means that cyclical unemployment in the Netherlands can be viewed as a fluctuation of the natural rate of unemployment.
Feature Extraction From Point Clouds

This paper describes a new method to extract feature lines directly from a surface point cloud. No surface reconstruction is needed in advance, only the inexpensive computation of a neighbor graph connecting nearby points. The feature extraction is performed in two stages. The first stage constists of assigning a penalty weight to each point that indicates the unlikelihood that the point is part of a feature and assigning these penalty weights to the edges of a neighbor graph. Extracting a subgraph of the neighbor graph that minimizes the edge penalty weights then produces a set of feature patterns. The second stage is especially useful for noisy data. It recovers feature lines and junctions by fitting wedges to the crease lines and corners to the junctions. As the method works on the local neighbor graph only, it is fast and automatically adapts to the sampling resolution. This makes the approach ideal as a preprocessing step in mesh generation. CR Categories: I.4. 6 Segmentation [Edge and feature detection]—;
Homotopy invariants and time evolution in (2+1)-dimensional gravity.

We establish the relation between the ISO(2,1) homotopy invariants, and the poly- gon representation of (2+1)-dimensional gravity. The polygon closure conditions, together with the SO(2,1) cycle conditions, are equivalent to the ISO(2,1) cycle conditions for the represen- tations ρ : π1(�g,N) → ISO(2,1). Also, the symplectic structure on the space of invariants is closely related to that of the polygon representation. We choose one of the polygon variables as internal time and compute the Hamiltonian, then perform the Hamilton-Jacobi transformation explicitly. We make contact with other authors' results for g = 1 and g = 2 (N = 0).