Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Unconventional transistor sizing for reducing power alleviates threshold voltage variations

Digital circuits can be synthesized with only NANDs or NORs, while delay and power can be quite different. Scaling transistors increases their sensitivity to variations and in particular to threshold voltage variations (σVTH). Sizing transistors trades delay versus power, while unconventional sizing (e.g., L >; Lmin, W/L <; 1, fine-grained increments, multifinger FETs) was proposed recently for reducing power and also σVTH. Using Monte Carlo simulations we perform an analysis of how sensitive the output voltages of NAND-2 and NOR-2 are to increasing L over Lmin, and examine how such sizing affects delay, power, and power-delay-product of these two gates.
Older Americans Act Nutrition Program Improves Participants' Food Security in Georgia

It is critical to use convincing research methodology to demonstrate the benefits of nutrition assistance programs targeted to vulnerable older adults. We examined the impact of Older Americans Act Nutrition Program (OAANP) participation on food security in participants and waitlisted people in Georgia using two waves of self-administered mail surveys conducted 4 months apart (n = 717, mean age 74.6 ± 9.5, 70.9% female, 33.2% black). At baseline, 54% of the sample was food insecure. Waitlisted people reported higher levels of persistent food insecurity (45.9%) or becoming food insecure (10.0%) than participants (29.3% and 7.1%, respectively) over 4 months. While considering potential confounders, the estimated odds of achieving food security were 1.65 times (95% CI: 1.10–2.48) higher in participants than in waitlisted people over 4 months. Our data suggest the feasibility of using food insecurity measures to detect the benefits of OAANP participation as well as the need to increase the capacity of OAANP.
Shielding and synchrotron radiation in toroidal waveguide

We develop a new approach to the calculation of the synchrotron radiation in a toroidal vacuum chamber. Using a small parameter $ϵ=\sqrt{a/R}$, where $a$ is the characteristic size of the cross section of the toroid and $R$ is the bending radius, we simplify Maxwell's equations assuming that the characteristic frequency of the modes $\ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\sim}c/aϵ$ and neglect terms of higher order in $ϵ$. For a rectangular cross section of the waveguide, we find an analytical solution of the equations and analyze their asymptotics at very high frequency. We then obtain an equation which gives radiation into each synchronous mode. We demonstrate the flexibility of the new method by calculating the frequencies and the loss factors for the lowest modes in square and round waveguides.
Molecular Motions of the Outer Ring of Charge of the Sodium Channel

In contrast to fast inactivation, the molecular basis of sodium (Na) channel slow inactivation is poorly understood. It has been suggested that structural rearrangements in the outer pore mediate slow inactivation of Na channels similar to C-type inactivation in potassium (K) channels. We probed the role of the outer ring of charge in inactivation gating by paired cysteine mutagenesis in the rat skeletal muscle Na channel (rNav1.4). The outer charged ring residues were substituted with cysteine, paired with cysteine mutants at other positions in the external pore, and coexpressed with rat brain β1 in Xenopus oocytes. Dithiolthreitol (DTT) markedly increased the current in E403C+E758C double mutant, indicating the spontaneous formation of a disulfide bond and proximity of the α carbons of these residues of no more than 7 Å. The redox catalyst Cu(II) (1,10-phenanthroline)3 (Cu(phe)3) reduced the peak current of double mutants (E403C+E758C, E403C+D1241C, E403C+D1532C, and D1241C+D1532C) at a rate proportional to the stimulation frequency. Voltage protocols that favored occupancy of slow inactivation states completely prevented Cu(phe)3 modification of outer charged ring paired mutants E403C+E758C, E403C+D1241C, and E403C+D1532C. In contrast, voltage protocols that favored slow inactivation did not prevent Cu(phe)3 modification of other double mutants such as E403C+W756C, E403C+W1239C, and E403C+W1531C. Our data suggest that slow inactivation of the Na channel is associated with a structural rearrangement of the outer ring of charge.
Scalable cryptographic authentication for high performance computing

High performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computing clusters to solve large computational problems. Frequently HPC resources are shared systems and access to restricted data sets or resources must be authenticated. These authentication needs can take multiple forms, both internal and external to the HPC cluster. A computational stack that uses web services among nodes in the HPC may need to perform authentication between nodes of the same job or a job may need to reach out to data sources outside the HPC. Traditional authentication mechanisms such as passwords or digital certificates encounter issues with the distributed and potentially disconnected nature of HPC systems. Distributing and storing plain-text passwords or cryptographic keys among nodes in a HPC system without special protection is a poor security practice. Systems that reach back to the user's terminal for access to the authenticator are possible, but only in fully interactive supercomputing where connectivity to the user's terminal can be guaranteed. Point solutions can be enabled for these use cases, such as software-based role or self-signed certificates, however they require significant expertise in digital certificates to configure. A more general solution is called for that is both secure and easy to use. This paper presents an overview of a solution implemented on the interactive, on-demand LLGrid computing system [1,2,3] at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and its use to solve one such authentication problem.
Compact, Efficient and Unlimited Capacity: Language Modeling with Compressed Suffix Trees

Efficient methods for storing and querying language models are critical for scaling to large corpora and high Markov orders. In this paper we propose methods for modeling extremely large corpora without imposing a Markov condition. At its core, our approach uses a succinct index ‐ a compressed suffix tree ‐ which provides near optimal compression while supporting efficient search. We present algorithms for on-the-fly computation of probabilities under a Kneser-Ney language model. Our technique is exact and although slower than leading LM toolkits, it shows promising scaling properties, which we demonstrate through1-order modeling over the full Wikipedia collection.
Materials for the Study of the Position Effect of Normal and Mutant Genes.

'" In Morgan, T. H. , Bridges, C. B. , and Schultz, J., Yearbook Carnegie Inst. , No. 36, 298-305 (1937). 37 Kerkis, J. J., Amer. Nat., 70, 81-86 (1936). '1 It is possible, however, that this deviation is somewhat misleading, for the change in phenotype may be broken down into two components-a change from wild type to brown and a change from homogeneous eye color to variegated. The former change is more marked in homozygotes than in heterozygotes, but the latter is diminished. 39 Mather, K. , Genetics, 24, 413-435 (1939). 40 Caspersson, T. , Naturwiss. , 31/32, 514-515 (1940). 41 Caspersson, T. , Chromosoma, 1, 562-604 (1940). 42 Mirsky, A. E. , and Pollister, A. W. , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 28, 344-352 (1942). '3 This paper was read prior to publication by Drs. M. Delbriick, Th. Dobzhansky, H. B. Glass, B. McClintock, H. J. Muller, C. Stern and several members of this department to whom we wish to express our thanks.
Exploiting auditory fovea in humanoid-human interaction

A robot's auditory perception of the real world should be able to cope with motor and other noises caused by the robot's own movements in addition to environment noises and reverberation. This paper presents the <i>active direction-pass filter</i> (ADPF) that separates sounds originating from a specified direction detected by a pair of microphones. Thus the ADPF is based on directional processing - a process used in visual processing. The ADPF is implemented by hierarchical integration of visual and auditory processing with hypothetical reasoning of interaural phase difference (IPD) and interaural intensity difference (IID) for each sub-band. The ADPF gives differences in resolution in sound localization and separation depending on where the sound comes from: the resolving power is much higher for sounds coming directly from the front of the humanoid than for sounds coming from the periphery. This directional resolving property is similar to that of the eye whereby the visual fovea at the center of the retina is capable of much higher resolution than is the periphery of the retina. To exploit the corresponding "auditory fovea", the ADPF controls the direction of the head. The human tracking and sound source separation based on the ADPF is implemented on the upper-torso of the humanoid and runs in real-time using distributed processing by 5 PCs networked via a gigabit ethernet. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and noise reduction ratio of each sound separated by the ADPF from a mixture of two or three speeches of the same volume were increased by about 2.2 dB and 9 dB, respectively.
An improved successive cancellation decoder for polar codes

The successive cancellation decoder is the first decoding algorithm for polar codes which can achieve binary memoryless symmetric channels' capacity. However, SC does not perform well. A method called SC List algorithm is proposed and is one of the best algorithms in terms of balance between bits error rate and computation complexity. In this paper, we find that CRC-aided SCL algorithm improves the effect of polar codes. This scheme is that CRC and polar codes play an inner and outer codes role in a concatenation codes. Simulation shows that Frame error rate of length N=1024 under SCL decoding with L=2 and an 8 bit CRC polar codes perform better than length N=1944 under offset min-sum decoding LDPC codes with a flooding schedule and a maximum of 10 iterations. All simulation is in the binary input addition white Gaussian noise channel and use BPSK modulation. Furthermore, the complexity of CRC-aided SCL algorithm is acceptable. The only weak point is that we need to sacrifice a little information rate.
A novel region of interest selection approach for traffic sign recognition based on 3D modelling

Most existing vision-based traffic sign recognition (TSR) systems rely for the initial shape detection on a processing step that assumes possible positions and sizes for traffic signs to be known a priori. Usually the better the expected position and size can be estimated, the better do these shape detection algorithms perform concerning accuracy and processing time. This paper presents a novel region of interest concept that is based on the known real world positions of traffic signs during the different driving situations. The vehicle surrounding along the predicted host path and the expected positions of traffic signs are modelled in 3D. A projection to the image plane results in a region of interest for traffic signs. This projected region of interest reduces the search-space for initial candidate detection. A reduced search-space leads to a lower number of false positives and reduced computational costs.
Exploiting Coordination Locales in Distributed POMDPs via Social Model Shaping

Distributed POMDPs provide an expressive framework for modeling multiagent collaboration problems, but NEXP-Complete complexity hinders their scalability and application in real-world domains. This paper introduces a subclass of distributed POMDPs, and TREMOR, an algorithm to solve such distributed POMDPs. The primary novelty of TREMOR is that agents plan individually with a single agent POMDP solver and use social model shaping to implicitly coordinate with other agents. Experiments demonstrate that TREMOR can provide solutions orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms while achieving comparable, or even superior, solution quality.
Enforcing File System Permissions on Android External Storage: Android File System Permissions (AFP) Prototype and ownCloud

Mobile devices are fast becoming critical information management tools often storing a range of personal and corporate confidential data often synced from online and cloud based storage services. Mobile device operating system designers are increasing the security available to users, not only from traditional security risk vectors, but also to protect their privacy from the various apps (with potential malicious intent) installed on their device. In this paper, we developed a process for enforcing file system permissions on Android external storage (with minimal modifications to the operating system). Our process makes use of the application sandboxing supported on this platform to restrict parts of the external file system to a particular app or multiple apps holding a particular permission. We present an Android File system Permissions (AFP) prototype demonstrating the applicability of this work and demonstrate its utility using the own Cloud app for Android. We then highlight a number of limitations with the current permission enforcement capabilities for external storage on the platform.
Flower Development as an Interplay between Dynamical Physical Fields and Genetic Networks

In this paper we propose a model to describe the mechanisms by which undifferentiated cells attain gene configurations underlying cell fate determination during morphogenesis. Despite the complicated mechanisms that surely intervene in this process, it is clear that the fundamental fact is that cells obtain spatial and temporal information that bias their destiny. Our main hypothesis assumes that there is at least one macroscopic field that breaks the symmetry of space at a given time. This field provides the information required for the process of cell differentiation to occur by being dynamically coupled to a signal transduction mechanism that, in turn, acts directly upon the gene regulatory network (GRN) underlying cell-fate decisions within cells. We illustrate and test our proposal with a GRN model grounded on experimental data for cell fate specification during organ formation in early Arabidopsis thaliana flower development. We show that our model is able to recover the multigene configurations characteristic of sepal, petal, stamen and carpel primordial cells arranged in concentric rings, in a similar pattern to that observed during actual floral organ determination. Such pattern is robust to alterations of the model parameters and simulated failures predict altered spatio-temporal patterns that mimic those described for several mutants. Furthermore, simulated alterations in the physical fields predict a pattern equivalent to that found in Lacandonia schismatica, the only flowering species with central stamens surrounded by carpels.
Identification of Type 2 Diabetes Risk Factors Using Phenotypes Consisting of Anthropometry and Triglycerides based on Machine Learning

The hypertriglyceridemic waist (HW) phenotype is strongly associated with type 2 diabetes; however, to date, no study has assessed the predictive power of phenotypes based on individual anthropometric measurements and triglyceride (TG) levels. The aims of the present study were to assess the association between the HW phenotype and type 2 diabetes in Korean adults and to evaluate the predictive power of various phenotypes consisting of combinations of individual anthropometric measurements and TG levels. Between November 2006 and August 2013, 11 937 subjects participated in this retrospective cross-sectional study. We measured fasting plasma glucose and TG levels and performed anthropometric measurements. We employed binary logistic regression (LR) to examine statistically significant differences between normal subjects and those with type 2 diabetes using HW and individual anthropometric measurements. For more reliable prediction results, two machine learning algorithms, naive Bayes (NB) and LR, were used to evaluate the predictive power of various phenotypes. All prediction experiments were performed using a tenfold cross validation method. Among all of the variables, the presence of HW was most strongly associated with type 2 diabetes (p <; 0.001, adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 2.07 [95% CI, 1.72-2.49] in men; p <; 0.001, adjusted OR = 2.09 [1.79-2.45] in women). When comparing waist circumference (WC) and TG levels as components of the HW phenotype, the association between WC and type 2 diabetes was greater than the association between TG and type 2 diabetes. The phenotypes tended to have higher predictive power in women than in men. Among the phenotypes, the best predictors of type 2 diabetes were waist-to-hip ratio + TG in men (AUC by NB = 0.653, AUC by LR = 0.661) and rib-to-hip ratio + TG in women (AUC by NB = 0.73, AUC by LR = 0.735). Although the presence of HW demonstrated the strongest association with type 2 diabetes, the predictive power of the combined measurements of the actual WC and TG values may not be the best manner of predicting type 2 diabetes. Our findings may provide clinical information concerning the development of clinical decision support systems for the initial screening of type 2 diabetes.
Insufficient anesthetic potency of nitrous oxide in the rat.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is frequently used for maintenance of anesthesia in research animals because of its minimal effect upon circulatory variables and the ability to rapidly alter its anesthetic concentration. However, N2O's low anesthetic potency may result in inadequate levels of anesthesia under experimental conditions; thus, the ability of N2O to provide adequate anesthesia during tracheal stimulation in rats, following withdrawal of halothane was evaluated. Twenty rats of similar ages and weights were anesthetized with halothane (1.44% inspired) and their tracheas orally intubated. Ten minutes prior to the conclusion of a 90-min halothane stabilization period, either 70% N2O (n = 10) or 70% nitrogen (n = 10) was added to the inspired anesthetic gas mixture. The halothane was discontinued at the conclusion of the 90-min period and each rat was observed for spontaneous motor behavior while end-expiratory anesthetic gases were intermittently measured with mass spectrometry. The halothane concentrations present at the times of four specific, consistently occurring behaviors were measured, and comparisons were made between the N2O and nitrogen groups by a mean t test. There were no significant differences (P less than 0.05) in the halothane concentration between the N2O and nitrogen groups in three of the four behaviors compared: 1) change in respiratory pattern, 2) purposeful movement of the torso, and 3) purposeful self-extubation. In the fourth behavior (purposeful movement of an extremity) the halothane concentration was higher in the N2O group than in the nitrogen group. A mean halothane concentration of 0.49% was required to prevent the purposeful behaviors in the presence of N2O. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Optimal Random Perturbation at Multiple Privacy Levels

Random perturbation is a popular method of computing anonymized data for privacy preserving data mining. It is simple to apply, ensures strong privacy protection, and permits effective mining of a large variety of data patterns. However, all the existing studies with good privacy guarantees focus on perturbation at a single privacy level. Namely, a fixed degree of privacy protection is imposed on all anonymized data released by the data holder. This drawback seriously limits the applicability of random perturbation in scenarios where the holder has numerous recipients to which different privacy levels apply. Motivated by this, we study the problem of multi-level perturbation, whose objective is to release multiple versions of a dataset anonymized at different privacy levels. The challenge is that various recipients may collude by sharing their data to infer privacy beyond their permitted levels. Our solution overcomes this obstacle, and achieves two crucial properties. First, collusion is useless, meaning that the colluding recipients cannot learn anything more than what the most trustable recipient (among the colluding recipients) already knows alone. Second, the data each recipient receives can be regarded (and hence, analyzed in the same way) as the output of conventional uniform perturbation. Besides its solid theoretical foundation, the proposed technique is both space economical and computationally efficient. It requires O (n+m) expected space, and produces a new anonymized version in O (n + log m) expected time, where n is the cardinality of the original dataset, and m the number of versions released previously. Both bounds are optimal under the realistic assumption that n » m.
Countering IPC Threats in Multiserver Operating Systems (A Fundamental Requirement for Dependability)

Multiserver operating systems have great potential to improve dependability, but, paradoxically, are paired with inherently more complex interprocess communication (IPC). Several projects have attempted to run drivers and extensions in isolated protection domains, but a systematic way to deal with IPC threats posed by untrusted parties is not yet available in the literature. IPC is fundamental to the dependability of multiserver systems.In this paper, we present a classification of IPC threats in multiserver systems with unreliable and hostile senders and receivers, such as resource exhaustion, spoofing, and unauthorized access. We also introduce an extended asymmetric trust model, describing two new IPC vulnerabilities relating to caller blockage. Based on our classification of IPC threats we present the IPC defense mechanisms and architecture of MINIX 3.
Organisational downsizing as a predictor of disability pension: the 10-town prospective cohort study

Objective: To examine whether downsizing, the reduction of personnel in organisations, is a predictor of increased risk of disability retirement among employees who kept their jobs. Design: Prospective cohort study. Based on reductions of personnel in participants’ occupation and workplace, employees were grouped into exposure categories of no downsizing (less than 8% reduction), minor downsizing (reduction between 8% and 18%), and major downsizing (more than 18% reduction). They were followed up for a five year period after downsizing. Setting: Four towns in Finland. Participants: 19 273 municipal employees, aged 21–54 years. Main outcome measures: All permanent full disability pensions granted because of medical reasons below 55 years of age between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1998 from the national registers. Results: In all, 223 employees were granted a permanent disability pension. The overall rate for disability pensions per 1000 employees was 7.7 after no downsizing, 13.1 after minor downsizing, and 14.9 after major downsizing. Cox proportional hazard models adjusted for age, sex, occupational status, type of employment contract, and town showed 1.81 (95% confidence intervals 1.22 to 2.70) times higher risk of disability retirement after major downsizing than after no downsizing. Conclusions: The immediate financial advantages of downsizing need to be considered in relation to increased occupational disability and the resulting extra costs to employers and society.