Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software thread-level speculation: an optimistic library implementation

Software thread level speculation (TLS) solutions tend to mirror the hardware ones, in the sense that they employ one, exact dependency-tracking mechanism. Our perspective is that software-flexibility is, perhaps, better exploited by a family of lighter, if less precise speculative models that can be combined together in an effective configuration, which takes advantage of the application's code-patterns. This paper reports on two main contributions. First, it introduces SpLSC: a software TLS model that trades the potential for false-positive violations for a small memory overhead and efficient implementation. Second, it presents PolyLibTLS: a library that encapsulates several lightweight models and enables their composition. In this context, we report on the template meta-programming techniques that we used to achieve performance and safety, while preserving library's modularity, extensibility and usability properties. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the user-framework interaction is straightforward and present parallelization timing results that validate our high-level perspective.
(Sub)millimetre emission from NGC 1569: An abundance of very small grains

We present new data of the dwarf galaxy NGC 1569 at 450 μ m, 850 μ m and 1200 μ m taken with SCUBA at the JCMT and the bolometer array at the IRAM 30 m telescope. After including data from IRAS at 12, 25, 60 and 100 μ m, we have successfully fitted the dust grain population model of Desert et al. (1990) to the observed midinfrared-to-millimetre spectrum. The fit requires a combination of both large and very small grains exposed to a strong radiation field as well as an enhancement of the number of very small grains relative to the number of large grains. We interpret this as the consequence of large grain destruction due to shocks in the turbulent interstellar medium of NGC 1569. The contribution of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH's) is found to be negligible. Comparison of the dust emission maps with an HI map of similar resolution shows that both dust and molecular gas distributions peak close to the radio continuum maximum and at a minimum in the HI distribution. From a comparison of these three maps and assuming that the gas-to-dust mass ratio is the same everywhere, we estimate the ratio of molecular hydrogen column density to integrated CO intensity to be about 25–30 times the local Galactic value. The gas-to-dust ratio is 1500–2900, about an order of magnitude higher than in the Solar Neighbourhood.
Novel m.15434C>A (p.230L>I) Mitochondrial Cytb Gene Missense Mutation Associated with Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Background. Previously it has been shown that various types of hypertrophic and dilative cardiomyopathy (hCMP, dCMP) can be attributed to disturbed mitochondrial oxidative energy metabolism. Several studies described mutations in mitochondrial DNA-located genes encoding for subunits of respiratory chain complexes, including the cytochrome b gene (MT-CYB), causing CMPs. Methods and Results. In the present study the MT-CYB gene was analysed in 30 patients with hCMP, 40 patients with dCMP, and 50 controls for alterations. Altogether, 27 MT-CYB variants were detected. Twenty-four of them were single nucleotide polymorphisms defining common haplogroups. The variant m.15434C>A was found in a single patient with severe dCMP and assessed as novel mutation, since it was not found in healthy controls or available data sets, and was nonhaplogroup associated with Phylotree. This variant altered an amino acid (L230I) with a high interspecific amino acid conservation index (CI = 97.7%) indicative of the functional importance of the residue. Conclusions. Though the L230I mutation seems to play a causative role for dCMP, prospective studies on yeast or transgenic mice models with defined mutation are warranted to study the pathogenetic impact of this mutation.
Sparse one hidden layer MLPs

We discuss how to build sparse one hidden layer MLP replac- ing the standard l2 weight decay penalty on all weights by an l1 penalty on the linear output weights. We will propose an iterative two step training procedure where the output weights are found using FISTA proximal op- timization algorithm to solve a Lasso-like problem and the hidden weights are computed by unconstrained minimization. As we shall discuss, the procedure has a complexity equivalent to that of standard MLP training, yields MLPs with similar performance and, as a by product, automatically selects the number of hidden units.
VANCOMYCIN RESISTANCE AND BIOFILM FORMATION AMONG METHICILLIN RESISTANT COAGULASE NEGATIVE STAPHYLOCOCCI ISOLATED FROM CONJUNCTIVITIS

Fifteen isolates of methicillin resistant coagulase negative staphylococci (MRCONS) recovered from fifteen cases of bacterial conjunctivitis were tested for their susceptibilities to ten antibiotics, by disc diffusion method, the extent of their susceptibilities to vancomycin by agar dilution method and, their capability for producing biofilm. Multiple antibiotic resistance was clearly recognized among all MRCONS and one strain was found resistant to all antibiotics. Six out of the 15 strains (40%) exhibited intermediate resistance to vancomycin (8-16 μg/ml) and one isolate (6.7%) recovered from adult age group was fully resistant to vancomycin (32 μg/ml). Biofilm production was expressed by 11 out of the 15 strains. These constituted seven isolates of VRCONS (100%) and four isolates out of MRCONS (50%). The association between biofilm formation and antibiotic resistance reflects clinical significance of these isolates and the need for determination of antibiotic susceptibility directly against biofilm-associated organisms.
‘It is like school sometimes’: friendship and sociality on university campuses and patterns of social inequality

ABSTRACT Whilst most social and educational research on friendship focuses on children at school, it remains a crucially important factor for students in higher education – and can play a key role in the maintenance, exacerbation or subversion of dominant forms of social inequalities. This paper explores the complexities of such dynamics in relation to friendship and social life at university, utilising data from an in-depth qualitative study of HE students at a UK campus university. Students stressed the importance of friendship for comfort and a sense of ‘belonging’. Nevertheless, students describe the continuation of cliques, hierarchies, and exclusions that are more commonly linked to sociality at school. Despite the conception that friendship is an individual experience, it is very much influenced by social positionings such as gender, class, age, and ethnicity – having significant repercussions for students in relation to happiness and wellbeing at university.
Cross-Linking of CD80 on CD4+ T Cells Activates a Calcium-Dependent Signaling Pathway1

CD80 expressed on the surface of APCs provides a positive costimulatory signal to naive CD4+ T cells via CD28 during activation. However, CD80 is also expressed on the surface of activated CD4+ T cells, and cross-linking CD80 on the surface of CD4+ T cells activated in the presence of Th1-promoting cytokines induces a direct up-regulation of T-bet, IFN-γ, and Bcl(XL) expression in primary CD4+ T cells. The present data show that naive CD4+ T cells activated in Th1-promoting conditions in the presence of anti-CD80 mAb increase the level of IFN-γ produced by increasing the rate of IFN-γ mRNA transcription, which is supported by an increase in the level of T-bet phosphorylation and T-bet binding to the third intronic enhancer in the IFN-γ locus. Furthermore, anti-CD80 mAb-induced increase in IFN-γ expression and T-bet phosphorylation is dependent upon the activation of a Ca2+-dependent pathway as shown by anti-CD80 mAb-induced intracellular Ca2+ flux following CD80 cross-linking. These findings indicate a novel regulatory role for CD80-mediated intracellular signals in CD4+ T cells and have important implications for disease therapies using anti-costimulatory mAbs as use of an intact CD80 mAb may lead to CD80 cross-linking on activated T cells and enhanced proinflammatory cytokine production.
Rethinking the influence of hydroelectric development on gene flow in a long-lived fish, the Lake Sturgeon Acipenser fulvescens

Many hydroelectric dams have been in place for 50 - >100 years, which for most fish species means that enough generations have passed for fragmentation induced divergence to have accumulated. However, for long-lived species such as Lake Sturgeon, Acipenser fulvescens, it should be possible to discriminate between historical population structuring and contemporary gene flow and improve the broader understanding of anthropogenic influence. On the Winnipeg River, Manitoba, two hypotheses were tested: 1) Measureable quantities of former reservoir dwelling Lake Sturgeon now reside downstream of the Slave Falls Generating Station, and 2) genetically differentiated populations of Lake Sturgeon occur upstream and downstream, a result of historical structuring. Genetic methods based on ten microsatellite markers were employed, and simulations were conducted to provide context. With regards to contemporary upstream to downstream contributions, the inclusion of length-at-age data proved informative. Both pairwise relatedness and Bayesian clustering analysis substantiated that fast-growing outliers, apparently entrained after residing in the upstream reservoir for several years, accounted for ~15% of the Lake Sturgeon 525–750 mm fork length captured downstream. With regards to historical structuring, upstream and downstream populations were found to be differentiated (FST = 0.011, and 0.013–0.014 when fast-growing outliers were excluded), and heterozygosity metrics were higher for downstream versus upstream juveniles. Historical asymmetric (downstream) gene flow in the vicinity of the generating station was the most logical explanation for the observed genetic structuring. In this section of the Winnipeg River, construction of a major dam does not appear to have fragmented a previously panmictic Lake Sturgeon population, but alterations to habitat may be influencing upstream to downstream contributions in unexpected ways.
Effects of Physical Embodiment on Social Presence of Social Robots

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the relative effectiveness of physical embodiment on social presence of social robots. The results of Experiment 1 show positive effects of physical embodiment of social robots (PESR) in the feeling of social presence, the general evaluation of social robots, the assessment of public opinion of social robots, and the evaluation of interaction with social robots. The result of a path analysis also provides the evidence of the mediating effect of social presence in people’s general evaluation of social robots. However, the results of Experiment 2 show that PESR without touch-input capability causes negative effects. Implications for the relative effectiveness of PESR, the importance of tactile communication in human-robot interaction, as well as the market potential for social robots in relation to loneliness are discussed.
Noise suppression based on approximate KLT with wavelet packet expansion

In this paper, we perform the noise suppression based on approximate Karhunen-Loeve transform (KL T). The discrete cosine transform(DCT) has been a good candidate for approximate KLT when the signal is modeled as an autoregressive process. However, for nonstationary signals, wavelet transform is more capable than DCT while approximating KLT. To calculate approximate KLT, we first represent the signal by using wavelet packet based on a basis search algorithm, then eigenvectors are evaluated from the basis. A linear estimator based on these eigenvectors can be constructed and used to perform noise reduction. We evaluate the performance of this method by using the Aurora-2 database. The SNR improvement is calculated. Some waveforms and spectrograms of enhanced speech are also shown. Finally. the enhanced speech is tested for speech recognition. These experimental results show that this method achieves satisfactory enhancement of speech.
Floe: A Continuous Dataflow Framework for Dynamic Cloud Applications

Applications in cyber-physical systems are increasingly coupled with online instruments to perform long running, continuous data processing. Such "always on" dataflow applications are dynamic, where they need to change the applications logic and performance at runtime, in response to external operational needs. Floe is a continuous dataflow framework that is designed to be adaptive for dynamic applications on Cloud infrastructure. It offers advanced dataflow patterns like BSP and MapReduce for flexible and holistic composition of streams and files, and supports dynamic recomposition at runtime with minimal impact on the execution. Adaptive resource allocation strategies allow our framework to effectively use elastic Cloud resources to meet varying data rates. We illustrate the design patterns of Floe by running an integration pipeline and a tweet clustering application from the Smart Power Grids domain on a private Eucalyptus Cloud. The responsiveness of our resource adaptation is validated through simulations for periodic, bursty and random workloads.
A variation tolerant architecture for ultra low power multi-processor cluster

Process and environmental temperature variations have a detrimental effect on performance and reliability of modern embedded systems. This sensitivity to operating conditions significantly increases in ultra-low-power (ULP) devices and in all those applications that rely on reduced supply voltage to achieve energy efficiency. We propose a lightweight runtime solution to tolerate process and environmental temperature variations. The novelty of our solution is the ability to tackle both hold time and setup time sensitivity to variations by dynamically adapting latencies of the datapaths without compromising execution correctness. We extensively tested our solution evaluating the trade-offs, demonstrating the cost, performance, reliability gain compared to state-of-the-art static solutions. The proposed solution is able to reach a performance gain up to 30% with a very low (≈ 4%) area overhead.
Does "Depth" Really Matter? On the Role of Model Refinement for Testing and Reliability

Model-based testing attempts to generate test cases from a model focusing on relevant aspects of a given system under consideration (SUC). When SUC becomes too large to be modeled in a single step, existing design techniques usually require a modularization of the modeling process. Thereby, the refinement process results in a decomposition of the model into several hierarchical layers. Conventional testing requires the refined components be completely replaced by these subcomponents for test case generation. Mostly, this resolution of components leads to an oversized, large model where test case generation becomes very costly, and the generated test case set is very large leading to infeasible long test execution time. To solve these problems, we present a new strategy to reduce (i) the number of test cases, and (ii) the costs of test case generation and test execution. For determining the trade-off due to this cost reduction, the reliability achieved by the new approach is compared with the reliability of the conventional approach. A case study based on a large web-based commercial system validates the approach and discusses its characteristics. We found out that the new approach could detect about 80% of the faults for about 20% of the test effort compared with the conventional approach.
Generalization of Entropy Based Divergence Measures for Symbolic Sequence Analysis

Entropy based measures have been frequently used in symbolic sequence analysis. A symmetrized and smoothed form of Kullback-Leibler divergence or relative entropy, the Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD), is of particular interest because of its sharing properties with families of other divergence measures and its interpretability in different domains including statistical physics, information theory and mathematical statistics. The uniqueness and versatility of this measure arise because of a number of attributes including generalization to any number of probability distributions and association of weights to the distributions. Furthermore, its entropic formulation allows its generalization in different statistical frameworks, such as, non-extensive Tsallis statistics and higher order Markovian statistics. We revisit these generalizations and propose a new generalization of JSD in the integrated Tsallis and Markovian statistical framework. We show that this generalization can be interpreted in terms of mutual information. We also investigate the performance of different JSD generalizations in deconstructing chimeric DNA sequences assembled from bacterial genomes including that of E. coli, S. enterica typhi, Y. pestis and H. influenzae. Our results show that the JSD generalizations bring in more pronounced improvements when the sequences being compared are from phylogenetically proximal organisms, which are often difficult to distinguish because of their compositional similarity. While small but noticeable improvements were observed with the Tsallis statistical JSD generalization, relatively large improvements were observed with the Markovian generalization. In contrast, the proposed Tsallis-Markovian generalization yielded more pronounced improvements relative to the Tsallis and Markovian generalizations, specifically when the sequences being compared arose from phylogenetically proximal organisms.
The convergence of parameter estimates is not necessary for a general self-tuning control system- stochastic plant

This paper is concerned with the stability and convergence of a general stochastic self-tuning control (STC) system, which consists of arbitrary control strategy and arbitrary estimation algorithm. The necessary conditions required for global stability and convergence are relaxed, i.e., the convergence of parameter estimates is removed. The key point is that with the help of Virtual Equivalent System (VES) concept, the original nonlinear dominant (nonlinear in structure) problem of stochastic STC is converted to a linear dominant (linear in structure) problem— stochastic slow switching control system.
Local Kernel Regression Score for Selecting Features of High-Dimensional Data

In general, irrelevant features of high-dimensional data will degrade the performance of an inference system, e.g., a clustering algorithm or a classifier. In this paper, we therefore present a Local Kernel Regression (LKR) scoring approach to evaluate the relevancy of features based on their capabilities of keeping the local configuration in a small patch of data. Accordingly, a score index featuring applicability to both of supervised learning and unsupervised learning is developed to identify the relevant features within the framework of local kernel regression. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed approach in comparison with the existing methods.
Neurological Underpinnings to Understanding and Dealing with Stress at Work

Abstract In 1992, a United Nations report had called work stress as ‘The 20th Century Disease’. The ‘always on’ economy of the 21st century has ensured that the prevalence of work-related stress is omnipresent even now like the mobile phones that perpetrate it. As stressors in the environment are continually present, what appears to be an antidote, is to change the response and have a more resilient response. In discussing resilient response, the article more specifically focuses on neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity or ‘brain plasticity’ refers to the brain’s ability to change or adapt both physically and functionally throughout life by stimulation from one’s environment, behaviour, thinking, emotions, etc. The article is based on this plasticity and the contention that brain can be structurally altered through the practice of mindfulness and meditation to develop resilience to stress, and respond better to stress. The article draws from the recent findings in neuroscience to strengthen this argument.
A Taxonomy Of Mobility: Some Implications And Requirements For Mobile Information Appliances

The term mobility can be understood from different perspectives: from the technological point of view, through information, to people. Because of this wide acceptance, it was hard to provide a wider and more unified categorisation of all aspects involved in mobility. Even so, this paper proposes to introduce the taxonomy of mobility. The taxonomy consisted of three independent components from the user perspective: the mobility of people; the mobility of infrastructure and the mobility of information. The paper analyses the three dimensions and presents the implications of mobility in all aspects of life. The papers concludes with some remarks and a list of requirements for mobility of information appliances.
English Teachers’ Perceptions of Technology Integration: Are They Different From Their Peers in Engineering and Medical Science?

The role played by subject areas in information and communication technology (ICT) integration has been insufficiently researched. This study compares English language teachers' perceptions of ICT integration with their peers in engineering and medical science in ICT integration. It also examines the effects of teachers’ sociobiographical variables (gender, age, computer proficiency, and years of teaching experience) predict teachers’ perceptions of ICT integration. A total of 180 teachers (112 males, 68 females) responded to a Teacher Technology Questionnaire (Lowther, Inan, Strahl, & Ross, 2008). Results show that among the predictor variables, computer skills had the highest relative impact on ICT integration. Furthermore, English language teachers' perceptions of ICT are reported to be similar to those of their peers in engineering and medical science. This study does not lend support to any significant role played by subject area in ICT integration. Implications for teaching are offered.
Identification of Cis-Acting Promoter Elements in Cold- and Dehydration-Induced Transcriptional Pathways in Arabidopsis, Rice, and Soybean

The genomes of three plants, Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), rice (Oryza sativa), and soybean (Glycine max), have been sequenced, and their many genes and promoters have been predicted. In Arabidopsis, cis-acting promoter elements involved in cold- and dehydration-responsive gene expression have been extensively analysed; however, the characteristics of such cis-acting promoter sequences in cold- and dehydration-inducible genes of rice and soybean remain to be clarified. In this study, we performed microarray analyses using the three species, and compared characteristics of identified cold- and dehydration-inducible genes. Transcription profiles of the cold- and dehydration-responsive genes were similar among these three species, showing representative upregulated (dehydrin/LEA) and downregulated (photosynthesis-related) genes. All (46 = 4096) hexamer sequences in the promoters of the three species were investigated, revealing the frequency of conserved sequences in cold- and dehydration-inducible promoters. A core sequence of the abscisic acid-responsive element (ABRE) was the most conserved in dehydration-inducible promoters of all three species, suggesting that transcriptional regulation for dehydration-inducible genes is similar among these three species, with the ABRE-dependent transcriptional pathway. In contrast, for cold-inducible promoters, the conserved hexamer sequences were diversified among these three species, suggesting the existence of diverse transcriptional regulatory pathways for cold-inducible genes among the species.