Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Integrated Approach for Managing Read Disturbs in High-Density NAND Flash Memory

The read-disturb problem is emerging as one of the main reliability issues in high-density NAND flash memory. A read-disturb error, which causes data loss, occurs to a page when a large number of reads are performed to its neighboring pages. In this paper, we propose a novel integrated approach for managing the read-disturb problem. Our approach is based on our key observations from the NAND physics that the read disturbance to neighboring pages is a function of the read voltage and the read time. Since the read disturbance has an exponential dependence on the read voltage, lowering the read voltage can improve the read-disturb resistance of a NAND block. By modifying NAND chips to support multiple read modes with different read voltages, our approach allows a flash translation layer module to exploit the tradeoff between the read disturbance and write speed. Since the read disturbance is also proportional to the read time, our approach exploits the difference in the read time among different NAND pages so that frequently read pages can be less intensively read-disturbed using fast page reads. By intelligently relocating read-intensive data to read-disturb resistant blocks and pages, our approach can reduce a large portion of the time overhead from managing read-disturb errors. We also propose a proactive data migration technique which is effective in reducing large variations in I/O response times of the existing on-demand read reclaim (RR) technique. Our experimental results show that our proposed techniques can reduce the execution time overhead by 73% over the existing read-disturb management technique while reducing I/O response time fluctuations during RR activations.
Privacy aware P 2 P Friend Locator

A friend locator is a location-based service that is used to detect proximity of when two users are within a user defined distance of each other. When such a service is to be developed for mobile users, two main topics needs to be taken into account. First of all, privacy is a very essential element. The users must not risk revealing personal information about their locations and whereabouts. Second, communication costs is still a very essential topic, when considering mobile devices connected to the Internet. To meet these two general requirements, this paper presents a peer-to-peer location-based service, that is optimized both for privacy and for minimizing communication costs. Three main techniques are employed to reach this goal, namely cloaked regions, dynamic shifted circles and secure multi-party computations. This has ended up with a solution, where a user only communicates with the friends it wishes to detect proximity with, and all a user knows about a friend is, how for away the friend is, with some degree of imprecision. The user does not know in which direction the friend is located, thus it is hard to guess where the friend is located. To reduce communication costs, buffer zones for each user is generated, that allow the user to move freely around within this zone without having to perform any location updates. The solution is flexible, due to proximity distance and precision can be adjusted for each pair of friends. The design has been implemented in a prototype, and tests have been performed to show that it is communicational wise effective.
Survey of Australian’s knowledge, perception and use of cannabis for medicinal purposes

Since this time the Australian Federal Parliament has also passed amendments to the Narcotic Drugs Act 1967 to allow for the cultivation of cannabis for medicinal or scientific purposes with prescription access via registered General Practitioners as early as 2017. Despite this, some believe that movements toward the legalisation of cannabis use for medical purposes are premature as there is not yet a solid evidence base to guide safe and effective clinical practice where prescription without TGA regulation is required in recent policy changes [9-13].
Persistence and periodicity in a dynamic proximity network

The topology of social networks can be understood as being inherently dynamic, with edges having a distinct position in time. Most characterizations of dynamic networks discretize time by converting temporal information into a sequence of network "snapshots" for further analysis. Here we study a highly resolved data set of a dynamic proximity network of 66 individuals. We show that the topology of this network evolves over a very broad distribution of time scales, that its behavior is characterized by strong periodicities driven by external calendar cycles, and that the conversion of inherently continuous-time data into a sequence of snapshots can produce highly biased estimates of network structure. We suggest that dynamic social networks exhibit a natural time scale \Delta_{nat}, and that the best conversion of such dynamic data to a discrete sequence of networks is done at this natural rate.
Enhancing wireless security via optimal cooperative jamming

In this work, we analyze the secrecy rate in a cooperative network, where a source node is assisted by relay nodes via cooperative jamming for delivering a secret message to the destination in the presence of an eavesdropper node. We consider the availability of both full and partial channel state information (CSI), and we take into account average power limitation at the relays as we formulate the rate maximization problem as a primal-dual problem. We derive the closed form solution for the full CSI case, and we show that the optimal solution allows the transmission of only one relay. For the partial CSI case, we define the concept of secrecy outage, where some of packets are intercepted by the eavesdropper, and we derive the secrecy outage probability and throughput in terms of average channel statistics. Due to the high nonlinearity of the secrecy throughput term, we propose a gradient update algorithm for obtaining the optimal power solutions for the partial CSI case. Our simulations demonstrate the gains of cooperative jamming over direct transmission for both full and partial CSI cases, where it is shown that the secrecy rate of the direct transmission is increased significantly, by %20−%80, when CJ is employed with our optimal power assignment algorithm.
STRUCTURAL DIMENSIONS IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF LOCATIONAL CONFLICTS

LOCATIONAL CONFLICT is a frequent by-product of efforts to change the physical structure of man-made environments. Within the geography discipline, theoretical and empirical interests in the conflict basis of public and private decisions on the use of land were stimulated in the early 1970s by the work of Julian Wolpert and his associates. ' The resolution of conflicts over the locations of specific activities is seen as an important means of allocating benefits among locations2 and has led to considerable variations in the distribution of necessary services and amenities among residents of the Indeed, irrespective of overt evidences of conflict occurrence, David Harvey has characterized the land-use pattern itself as an important indicator of the socio-political rules which direct urban de~eloprnent. ~ Although the conceptualization of locational-conflict research has drawn broadly from economics and other social sciences, the empirical work in this area has been more narrowly conceived, focusing on individual conflict issues and emphasizing their unique sets of participants, arguments, and environmental circumstances. Michael Dear has called attention to the difficulties imposed by this case-by-case approach on efforts to account for the system-wide impacts of specific land-use decisions.5 But, in addition, this approach has not permitted a rigorous characterization of the geographic pattern of conflicts within urban regions. For this purpose, there is need for a consistent set of data to identify the full range of conflicts associated with a city's development over given time periods. Ideally, such a data base should be readily available for cities of different sizes and cultural settings so that general conceptualizations of conflict patterns can be hypothesized and tested. Evidence on land-use changes might provide the basis for such analysis. But, land-use changes per se need not necessarily lead to locational conflicts. Nonetheless, areas having high levels of land-use transition may be expected to generate more overt public debates over land-use issues than areas of comparative stability. Although no specific identity of locational conflicts was attempted, Bourne's" analysis of the aggregate of changes for 27 land-use activities within metropolitan Toronto offers an important contextual framework for understanding an urban area's conflict pattern. Using a principal components procedure, he defined a typology of the most significant components of change from 1963 to 1971. This consisted of ( 1 ) suburbanization, (2) the renewal of the urban core and fringe, (3 1 public park expansion and the growth of service networks (utilities and roads), and (4) the growth and decline of nucleated specialized activities (e.g., the removal of industrial uses from the inner-city and the spread of institutional, recreational, and high-rise residential uses to the suburbs). The research described in this paper results in conclusions which parallel those of Bourne; however, it differs with respect to specific objectives, the sources of data, and the procedures of analysis. 311
Worker Perceptions of Skills Necessary for Survival in the World of Work. Thesis.

EDRS PRICE N? -$0.83 HC-$7.35 Plus Postage DESCRIPTORS Decision Raking; Doctoral Theses; *Employee Attitudes; Employee Responsibility; *Eaployaent Qualifications; Interpersonal Competence; *Job Satisfaction; *Job Skills; Occupational Information; Occupational Surveys; Participant Characteristics; Performance Criteria; Problem Solving; Questionnaires; *State Surveys; Tables (Data) IDENTIFIERS *Illinois
The Annotation Scheme for Uyghur Dependency Treebank

The paper introduces a dependency annotation effort which aims to fully annotate an Uyghur corpus. It is the first attempt of its kind to develop a large scale tree-bank for Uyghur. In this paper, we provide the motivation for following the dependency theory as the annotation scheme and argue that the dependency grammar is better suited to model the various linguistic phenomena in Uyghur. In our solution, the syntactic relations are encoded as labeled dependency relations among segments of lexical items and sequence of inflectional groups separated by derivational boundaries. We present the basic annotation scheme including morphological and syntactically dependency relation. We also show how the scheme handles some phenomenon such as omissions in copula sentences, punctuations and coordinations, etc.
Automatic determination of MS lesion subtypes based on fractal analysis in brain MR images

In this paper a novel approach based on fractal analysis has been proposed to determine MS lesions into two subtypes (i.e., Enhancing lesions (Acute), T1 “black holes” (chronic) lesions) in Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) MR images, automatically. In the proposed method, firstly, MS lesion voxels are segmented in FLAIR images using Entropy-Based EM Algorithm and Markov Random Field (MRF) model. Then, Fractal dimension of each lesion voxel is computed in FLAIR images and used with signal intensity features (T1-weighted, gadolinium enhanced T1-weighted, T2-weighted). Finally, a neural network classifier is applied to feature vectors. Evaluation of the proposed method was performed by manual segmentation of chronic and acute lesions in gadolinium enhanced T1-weighted (Gad-E-T1-w) images by studying T1-weighted (T1-w) and T2-weighted (T2-w) images, using similarity criteria. The results showed a good correlation between the lesions segmented by the proposed method and by experts manually. Thus, the suggested method is useful to reduce the need for paramagnetic materials in contrast enhanced MR imaging which is a routine procedure for separation of acute and chronic lesions.
Acessibilidade alimentar e estabilização econômica no Brasil nos anos 90

Nos anos 90, a sociedade brasileira mobilizou-se nacionalmente na luta contra a fome e a miseria, frente ao acirramento das desigualdades sociais do pais, imposta pela instabilidade economica. Nessa ocasiao, muitas prefeituras e o proprio Governo Federal passaram a implementar programas voltados para a seguranca alimentar. O objetivo deste trabalho e analisar as mudancas no grau de acessibilidade alimentar promovidas pela estabilizacao economica apos 1994, quando tem inicio o Plano Real. Para isso, sao utilizados cruzamentos dos precos mensais da cesta basica, instituida pelo Decreto-Lei 399/38, com o salario minimo e com a renda individual medida pela Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME) do IBGE, por Regiao Metropolitana. A fim de estudar o grau de acessibilidade nos estratos de renda socialmente mais vulneraveis, interpretam-se tambem suas variacoes nos quatro primeiros decimos da distribuicao. A conclusao revela uma periodizacao, com clara melhoria na acessibilidade alimentar da populacao mais pobre no periodo 95-97, decorrente nao da reducao dos precos dos alimentos mas do aumento na renda com o Real. De fins de 1997 em diante, entretanto, ha uma reversao dessa tendencia. Cai o grau de acessibilidade, em decorrencia do efeito conjugado de queda da renda individual e do aumento do preco da cesta basica. Tais variacoes sao analisadas regionalmente, assinalando padroes diferenciados entre areas desenvolvidas e regioes perifericas.
Three SRA-Domain Methylcytosine-Binding Proteins Cooperate to Maintain Global CpG Methylation and Epigenetic Silencing in Arabidopsis

Methylcytosine-binding proteins decipher the epigenetic information encoded by DNA methylation and provide a link between DNA methylation, modification of chromatin structure, and gene silencing. VARIANT IN METHYLATION 1 (VIM1) encodes an SRA (SET- and RING-associated) domain methylcytosine-binding protein in Arabidopsis thaliana, and loss of VIM1 function causes centromere DNA hypomethylation and centromeric heterochromatin decondensation in interphase. In the Arabidopsis genome, there are five VIM genes that share very high sequence similarity and encode proteins containing a PHD domain, two RING domains, and an SRA domain. To gain further insight into the function and potential redundancy among the VIM proteins, we investigated strains combining different vim mutations and transgenic vim knock-down lines that down-regulate multiple VIM family genes. The vim1 vim3 double mutant and the transgenic vim knock-down lines showed decreased DNA methylation primarily at CpG sites in genic regions, as well as repeated sequences in heterochromatic regions. In addition, transcriptional silencing was released in these plants at most heterochromatin regions examined. Interestingly, the vim1 vim3 mutant and vim knock-down lines gained ectopic CpHpH methylation in the 5S rRNA genes against a background of CpG hypomethylation. The vim1 vim2 vim3 triple mutant displayed abnormal morphological phenotypes including late flowering, which is associated with DNA hypomethylation of the 5′ region of FWA and release of FWA gene silencing. Our findings demonstrate that VIM1, VIM2, and VIM3 have overlapping functions in maintenance of global CpG methylation and epigenetic transcriptional silencing.
Friend-to-Friend Computing: Building the Social Web at the Internet Edges

The current Social Web is centralized. Large information silos store all the users’ profiles, their social links and much of the other personal data. In return for the reliable service the users allow their data and activities to be data mined by the service providers, which in this way increase their advertising revenue. As the social applications are storing increasingly more data and attracting more users, many questions about privacy, data ownership and data portability arise. In this paper we are going to critically assess the current state of the Social Web, identify several novel research problems and outline the possible solution: friend-tofriend computing (F2F). F2F is a completely decentralized architecture in which two computers can communicate only if their owners know one another. Constraining the connections to friends-only solves many of the security problems of the peer-to-peer architectures. We argue that a reliable social application platform can be built using F2F as the substrate. The platform gives the users much more control over their data than the current Social Web and ensures the level of privacy and security not possible in any centralized architecture. Groups can easily build their own ad-hoc networks and collaborate without the need for any servers or third-party services.
Adaptive Advantage

This Perspective from The Boston Consulting Group’s Strategy Institute is the second in a series on the future of strategy. The first, “New Bases of Competitive Advantage: The Adaptive Imperative” (October 2009), introduced six new sources of advantage that provide a necessary extension of classical approaches to strategy for today’s turbulent business environment. This article examines the central concept of adaptive advantage in further detail.
A robust method for camera motion estimation in movies based on optical flow

Camera motion estimation plays an important role in digital video analysis algorithms such as video indexing and retrieval or automatic movie analysis. Several algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem in MPEG videos. This paper presents an optical flow-based approach for the camera motion estimation in all kinds of digital video formats, especially in movies. It compares the motion vector fields (MVFs) with six predefined templates to determine the type of motion. The MVFs are generated by using high-accuracy optical flow computation. The advantage of the method lies in its robustness to noisy environments such as false motion vectors and object motions. Comprehensive experiments with video clips extracted from well-known feature movies demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.
Filter sharing: Efficient learning of parameters for volumetric convolutions

Typical convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have several millions of parameters and require a large amount of annotated data to train them. In medical applications where training data is hard to come by, these sophisticated machine learning models are difficult to train. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce the inherent complexity of CNNs during training by exploiting the significant redundancy that is noticed in the learnt CNN filters. Our method relies on finding a small set of filters and mixing coefficients to derive every filter in each convolutional layer at the time of training itself, thereby reducing the number of parameters to be trained. We consider the problem of 3D lung nodule segmentation in CT images and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in achieving good results with only few training examples.
Cost-Sensitive Reachability Heuristics for Probabilistic Planning

Reachability heuristics have lead to impressive scale-ups in deterministic planning making their application to probabilistic planning a promising research direction. We describe how one such reachability heuristic (based on planning graphs) can be extended to handle a class of cost-sensitive probabilistic planning problems. Specifically, we address the problem of conformant (non-observable) probabilistic planning, which is a special case of the non-observable MDP (NOMDP) problem. We show how the quality of plans generated by our planner improves with our cost-sensitive heuristic and how our planner far out-scales the best existing probabilistic planner.
The medicinal fungus Antrodia cinnamomea regulates DNA repair and enhances the radiosensitivity of human esophageal cancer cells

This study investigated the adjunctive effects of Antrodia cinnamomea mycelial fermentation broth (AC-MFB), a Taiwanese medicinal fungus, in enhancing the radiosensitivity of esophageal cancer cells. Human CE81T/VGH squamous and BE3 adenocarcinoma esophageal cancer cells were used in this study. A colony formation assay showed that pretreatment with AC-MFB decreased the survival of irradiated esophageal cancer cells, with a maximum sensitizer enhancement ratio of 1.91% and 37% survival. A DNA histogram study showed that AC-MFB pretreatment enhanced cell cycle arrest at the G2/M phase, the most radiosensitive phase. An immunofluorescence assay and a Western blotting assay showed that AC-MFB delayed the abrogation of γ-H2AX, upregulated p21 expression, and attenuated the radiation-induced phosphorylation of ataxia telangiectasia-mutated kinase and checkpoint kinase 2. An in vivo validation study showed that AC-MFB treatment tended to have a synergistic effect with radiation on the tumor growth delay of CE81T/VGH cells in BALB/c mice. These data suggest that this edible fungus product could enhance the effect of radiotherapy against esophageal cancer.
Elimination of bipolar induced drain breakdown and single transistor latch in submicron PD SOI MOSFET

For the first time, we report the combined application of a SiGe source and a delta-doped p/sup +/ region in a PD SOI MOSFET to minimize the impact of floating body effect on both the drain breakdown voltage and the single transistor latch. Our results demonstrate that the proposed SOI structure exhibits as large as 200% improvement in the breakdown voltage and is completely immune to single transistor latch when compared to the conventional SOI MOSFET thus improving the reliability of these structures in VLSI applications.
Universal Data Compression with Side Information at the Decoder by Using Traditional Universal Lossless Compression Algorithms

In this paper we investigate universal data compression with side information at the decoder by leveraging traditional universal data compression algorithms. Specifically, consider a source network with feedback in which a finite alphabet source X = {Xi}i=0 infin is to be encoded and transmitted, and another finite alphabet source Y = {Yi}i=0 infin available only to the decoder as the side information correlated with X. Assuming that the encoder and decoder share a uniform i.i. d. (independent and identically distributed) random database that is independent of (X, Y), we propose a string matching-based (variable-rate) block coding algorithm with a simple progressive encoder for the feedback source network. Instead of using standard joint typicality decoding, this algorithm derives its decoding rule from the codeword length function of a traditional universal lossless coding algorithm. As a result, neither the encoder nor the decoder assumes any prior knowledge of the joint distribution of (X, Y) or even the achievable rates. It is proven that for any (X, Y) in the class of all stationary, ergodic source-side information pairs with finite alphabet, the average number of bits per letter transmitted from the encoder to the decoder (compression rate) goes arbitrarily close to the conditional entropy rate H(X|Y) of X given Y asymptotically, and the average number of bits per letter transmitted from the decoder to the encoder (feedback rate) goes to 0 asymptotically.