Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dark Silicon: From Computation to Communication

In the emerging Dark Silicon era, not all parts of an on-chip system (i.e., cores, Network-on-Chip, and memory resources) can be simultaneously powered-on at the full speed. This paper aims at exposing dark silicon challenges to the NOCS community with an overview of some of the early research efforts that are attempting to shape the design and run-time management of future generation heterogeneous dark silicon processors. The goal is to cover both the computation and communication perspectives. In particular, we exploit computation and communication heterogeneity at multiple levels of system abstractions to design and manage dark silicon processors. The available dark silicon is leveraged to improve power/energy, performance, and reliability efficiency.
Stereo and Surround Panning in Practice

The apparent position of speech and music sound sources was investigated using both a two channel loudspeaker array and a three channel loudspeaker array. The results showed that a sine-cosine pan law was reasonably accurate for the three channel array, but consistently produced sharp images who’s positions were consistently wider than expected with a two channel array. The discrepancy was investigated using a headphone model. We found the apparent position depends strongly on the spectrum of the source, with speech frequencies tending to dominate the overall impression.
Role of brain death and the dead-donor rule in the ethics of organ transplantation

The “dead-donor rule” requires patients to be declared dead before the removal of life-sustaining organs for transplantation. The concept of brain death was developed, in part, to allow patients with devastating neurologic injury to be declared dead before the occurrence of cardiopulmonary arrest. Brain death is essential to current practices of organ retrieval because it legitimates organ removal from bodies that continue to have circulation and respiration, thereby avoiding ischemic injury to the organs. The concept of brain death has long been recognized, however, to be plagued with serious inconsistencies and contradictions. Indeed, the concept fails to correspond to any coherent biological or philosophical understanding of death. We review the evidence and arguments that expose these problems and present an alternative ethical framework to guide the procurement of transplantable organs. This alternative is based not on brain death and the dead-donor rule, but on the ethical principles of nonmaleficence (the duty not to harm, or primum non nocere) and respect for persons. We propose that individuals who desire to donate their organs and who are either neurologically devastated or imminently dying should be allowed to donate their organs, without first being declared dead. Advantages of this approach are that (unlike the dead-donor rule) it focuses on the most salient ethical issues at stake, and (unlike the concept of brain death) it avoids conceptual confusion and inconsistencies. Finally, we point out parallel developments, both domestically and abroad, that reflect both implicit and explicit support for our proposal.
To improve Bayesian Network Learner Modelling thanks to Multinet

Bayesian Network (BN) are often used for student modelling but some problems remain, particularly the question of the structure of the BN. The key idea of this paper is that the structure of a BN-based Student Model (BNb-SM) depends on the level of expertise of the student. Therefore, a model should be constituted with several concurrent BNs (same nodes, different structures), instead of a single one, as it is usually the case. We present a conceptual model, the multinet, that allows to take into account different BNs. A multinet is a probabilistic graphical knowledge representation that can be seen as a BN mixture. We present both theoretical and experimental results obtained with real student's data. These results give strong evidence in favour of our approach by showing that there is a correlation between the student's levels of expertise and the Bayesian networks which fit their interactions best.
Latino Cultural Differences in Maternal Assessments of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Symptoms in Children

Many aspects of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are likely influenced by culture, particularly the differences in perceptions of child behavior and the demands of the environment in homes, schools, and communities of people from different ethnic and cultural groups. In particular, ADHD-related behaviors must be understood within the context of cultural environments and expectations. This study examined differences in parental evaluations of ADHD-related child behaviors in the following three Latino ethnic populations: Mexican (n = 81), Mexican American (n = 179), and Puerto Rican (n = 60). Overall, results indicate an important role for acculturation in mothers’ perceptions of ADHD-related behaviors but only in the measures of hyperactivity and not in the attention deficit aspects of the disorder. Mothers from different Latino cultures and at different levels of acculturation differentially assess specific symptoms of ADHD, indicating the need for careful reassessment of the validity of the disorder for Latino families.
Will the economic downturn lead to an increase in crime?

The commissioning responsibility now resting with Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) was identifi ed as leading to some improvements in mental health care for prisoners. Similarly, there are some signs of improvement in the capacity to transfer mentally ill people from prison to suitable external services. However, the report outlines that there is still a gap as the mental health needs of prisoners have expanded in number, severity and complexity. Many boards felt that there was a lack of effective coordination of services, both within the prison, and between the prison and the local community. Examples of good practice identifi ed included:
Time-angle ocean acoustic tomography using sensitivity kernels: Numerical and experimental inversion results

In shallow water acoustic tomography, broadband mid-frequency acoustic waves (1 to 5 kHz) follow multiple ray-like paths to travel through the ocean. Travel-time (TT) variations associated to these raypaths are classically used to estimate sound speed perturbations of the water column using the ray theory. In this shallow water environment, source and receiver arrays, combined with adapted array processing, provide the measurement of directions-of-arrival (DOA) and directions-of-departure (DOD) of each acoustic path as new additional observables to perform ocean acoustic tomography. To this aim, the double-beamforming technique is used to extract the TT, DOA and DOD variations from the array-to-array acoustic records. Besides, based on the first order Born approximation, we introduce the time-angle sensitivity kernels to link sound speed perturbations to the three observable variations. This forward problem is then inverted with the maximum a posteriori method using both the extracted-observable variations and the proposed sensitivity kernels. Inversion results obtained on numerical data, simulated with a parabolic equation code, are presented. The inversion algorithm is performed with the three observables separately, namely TT, DOA and DOD. The three observables are then used jointly in the inversion process. The results are discussed in the context on ocean acoustic tomography.
Designing Multisocket Systems with Silicon Photonics

To fuel an increasing need for parallel performance, system designers have resulted to using multiple sockets to provide more hardware parallelism. These multisocket systems have limited off-chip bandwidth due to their electrical interconnect which is both power and pin limited. Current systems often use of a Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) to get the most system memory bandwidth from limited off-chip bandwidth. A NUMA system complicates the work of a performance programmer or operating system, because they must maintain data locality to maintain performance. Silicon photonics is an emerging technology that promises great off-chip bandwidth density and energy efficiency when compared to electrical signaling. With this abundance of bandwidth, it will be possible to build a relatively flat, high bandwidth memory interconnect. Because this interconnect has uniform bandwidth, NUMA optimizations will be unnecessary, which increases performance programmer productivity. If the penalties to making a multi-socket system are negated by the use of silicon photonics, there is less incentive to integrate, and economic incentives to disintegrate. In this thesis, we present this scalable and coherent multi-socket design along with discussing the tradeoffs facing an architect when incorporating silicon photonics technology.
On the synchronization bottleneck of OpenStack Swift-like cloud storage systems

As one type of the most popular cloud storage services, OpenStack Swift and its follow-up systems replicate each data object across multiple storage nodes and leverage object sync protocols to achieve high availability and eventual consistency. The performance of object sync protocols heavily relies on two key parameters: r (number of replicas for each object) and η (number of objects hosted by each storage node). In existing tutorials and demos, the configurations are usually r = 3 and n <; 1000 by default, and the object sync process seems to perform well. To deep understand object sync protocols, we first make a lab-scale OpenStack Swift deployment and run experiments with various configurations. We discover that in data-intensive scenarios, e.g., when r > 3 and n ≫ 1000, the object sync process is significantly delayed and produces massive network overhead. This phenomenon is referred to as the sync bottleneck problem. Then, to explore the root cause, we review the source code of OpenStack Swift and find that its object sync protocol utilizes a fairly simple and network-intensive approach to check the consistency among replicas of objects. In particular, each storage node is required to periodically multicast the hash values of all its hosted objects to all the other replica nodes. Thus in a sync round, the number of exchanged hash values per node is Θ(n×r). Further, to tackle the problem, we propose a lightweight object sync protocol called LightSync. It remarkably reduces the sync overhead by using two novel building blocks: 1) Hashing of Hashes, which aggregates all the h hash values of each data partition into a single but representative hash value with the Merkle tree; 2) Circular Hash Checking, which checks the consistency of different partition replicas by only sending the aggregated hash value to the clockwise neighbor. Its design provably reduces the per-node network overhead from Θ(n×r) to Θ(n/h). In addition, we have implemented LightSync as an open-source patch and adopted it to OpenStack Swift, thus reducing sync delay by up to 28.8× and network overhead by up to 14.2×.
An Empirical Evaluation of Bagging and Boosting

An ensemble consists of a set of independently trained classifiers (such as neural networks or decision trees) whose predictions are combined when classifying novel instances. Previous research has shown that an ensemble as a whole is often more accurate than any of the single classifiers in the ensemble. Bagging (Breiman 1996a) and Boosting (Freund & Schapire 1996) are two relatively new but popular methods for producing ensembles. In this paper we evaluate these methods using both neural networks and decision trees as our classification algorithms. Our results clearly show two important facts. The first is that even though Bagging almost always produces a better classifier than any of its individual component classifiers and is relatively impervious to overfitting, it does not generalize any better than a baseline neural-network ensemble method. The second is that Boosting is a powerful technique that can usually produce better ensembles than Bagging; however, it is more susceptible to noise and can quickly overfit a data set.
Re-offending: patients discharged from a Regional Secure Unit

Background This paper describes re-offending in all 234 patients who were discharged from a medium secure unit between October 1980 and October 1994, after a first admission. Method Data were collected from hospital records and the Offenders Index. Results A total of 24% of patients had at least one conviction, including 12% who were convicted of a serious offence. These figures are an underestimate of the true rate of re-offending as many patients spent a large proportion of the follow-up period in an institution, which reduced the opportunities for further offending. With this reservation in mind, and allowing for methodological differences, the rates are broadly comparable to those emerging from other follow-up studies of forensic psychiatric patients. They are much lower than recidivism rates for ordinary prisoners. Discussion It is argued that re-offending rates per se are of little value in measuring outcome in forensic psychiatric populations. There is a need to develop health-based outcome measures, which should include the occurrence of violence or other offensive behaviour, without reliance on the need for a criminal conviction. Copyright © 1999 Whurr Publishers Ltd.
MIXIT: The Network Meets the Wireless Channel

The traditional contract between the network and the lower layers states that the network does routing and the lower layers deliver correct packets. In a wireless network, however, different nodes may hear most bits in a transmission, yet none of them receives the whole packet uncorrupted. The current approach imposes fate sharing on the bits, dropping a whole packet because of a few incorrect bits. In contrast, this paper proposes MIXIT, a new architecture that performs opportunistic routing on groups of correctly received symbols. We show using simulations driven with Software Radios measurements that MIXIT provides 4x throughput improvement over state-of-the-art opportunistic routing.
pH-regulated anion antiport in nucleated mammalian cells

The uptake of 36Cl- into cells was measured after preincubation in medium containing nigericin and KCl to allow control of the intracellular pH. When the pH was increased from pH 7.0 to pH 7.3 there was a 10-fold increase in the rate of 36Cl- uptake. The increase was half maximal at pH 7.15 in Vero and L-cells, whereas in phorbol 12- myristate 13-acetate-treated Vero cells the increase was half maximal at pH 6.9. Kinetic studies showed that in cells preincubated with nigericin and isotonic KCl, both at pH 7.0 and at pH 8.0, the Km for Cl- was 7 mM. In the two cases the Jmax was 1.7 X 10(8) Cl- ions X cell-1 X s-1 and 1.6 X 10(9) Cl- ions X cell-1 X s-1, respectively. Bicarbonate inhibited 36Cl- uptake with a Ki of 5-6 mM. Probably, the anion antiporter plays a role in the regulation of the intracellular pH.
Toward a Theory of Fund Raising in Higher Education

Fund raising has played a prominent role in the history of American higher education and long been a central function of the academic presidency. Today fund raising provides support for more areas of higher education than ever before, and academic chief executives are increasingly expected or required to take an active role in procuring and stewarding private gifts for their institutions. This research was the first study of this phenomenon that is both national in scope and theory generating. The authors identified the key variables or prerequisites which determine fund-raising outcomes and formulated theoretical models which explain, respectively, the fund-raising process and presidential fund raising in higher education.
Thermal decomposition of calcite: Mechanisms of formation and textural evolution of CaO nanocrystals

Abstract Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), two-dimensional X-ray diffraction (2DXRD), and transmission electron microscopy coupled with selected area electron diffraction (TEMSAED) analyses of the reactant/product textural relationship show that the thermal decomposition of Iceland spar single crystals according to the reaction CaCO3(s) → CaO(s) + CO2(g) is pseudomorphic and topotactic. This reaction begins with the formation of a mesoporous structure made up of up to four sets of oriented rod-shaped CaO nanocrystals on each rhombohedral cleavage face of the calcite pseudomorph. The four sets formed on (101̅4)calcite display the following topotactic relationships: (1) (12̅10)calcite//(110)CaO; (2) (1̅104)calcite┴ (110)CaO; (3) (1̅018)calcite//(110)CaO; and (4) (01̅14)calcite┴(110)CaO; with [841]calcite//[11̅0]CaO in all four cases. At this stage, the reaction mechanism is independent of PCO2 (i.e., air or high vacuum). Strain accumulation leads to the collapse of the mesoporous structure, resulting in the oriented aggregation of metastable CaO nanocrystals (~5 nm in thickness) that form crystal bundles up to ~1 μm in cross-section. Finally, sintering progresses up to the maximum T reached (1150 °C). Oriented aggregation and sintering (plus associated shrinking) reduce surface area and porosity (from 79.2 to 0.6 m2/g and from 53 to 47%, respectively) by loss of mesopores and growth of micrometer-sized pores. An isoconversional kinetic analysis of non-isothermal thermogravimetric data of the decomposition of calcite in air yields an overall effective activation energy Eα = 176 ± 9 kJ/ mol (for α > 0.2), a value which approaches the equilibrium enthalpy for calcite thermal decomposition (177.8 kJ/mol). The overall good kinetic fit with the F1 model (chemical reaction, first order) is in agreement with a homogeneous transformation. These analytical and kinetic results enable us to propose a novel model for the thermal decomposition of calcite that explains how decarbonation occurs at the atomic scale via a topotactic mechanism, which is independent of the experimental conditions. This new mechanistic model may help reinterpret previous results on the calcite/CaO transformation, having important geological and technological implications.
The Impact of Group-as-a-Whole Work on Anxiety and Depression in a Severely Mentally Ill Population

This study explored the impact of a group-as-a-whole processing group on 11 severely mentally ill adult clients residing in a long term care facility over 30 weeks. Participants were evaluated for the effect of the group on anxiety and depression, using the Beck Depression Index (BDI-II) and the Beck Anxiety Index (BAI). This longitudinal study incorporated measurements at 4 time points, 10 weeks apart, and utilized a control group. The results demonstrated a significant reduction in anxiety for the experimental group, and a significant drop in depression in the experimental compared to the control group.
Text watermarking algorithm based on semantic role labeling

This paper proposes a new approach for text watermarking that uses the semantic roles to embed watermark information. The technology of natural language processing is applied to find and label the three types of semantic roles A0, A1 and ADV in a text. A watermark message is converted into the hexadecimal Unicode and then compressed with the Huffman encoding to form a digit string that consists of the digits 0, 1 and 2. Let the three types of the semantic roles correspond to the three kinds of the digits one to one. The watermark digits are embedded by mapping each digit into the location of a semantic role of the corresponding type. The algorithm does not make any change to the format and content of a text. It has good features of concealment and robustness and can resist various text format transformations and watermark attacks.
11 de Setembro: do terror à injustificada arbitrariedade e o terrorismo de Estado

Oartigo discute a definicao comumente aceita de “terrorismo” por considera-la “extensional” e nao intesional.Operigo e que dela se derivam decisoes politicas que conduzem ao emprego da forca. A falta de objetividade e criterios de aplicacao na definicao extensional faz dela uma caraterizacao arbitraria e, de sua aplicacao, uma decisao meramente politica. Alem das questoes ontologicas e epistemologicas dessa forma arbitraria de definicao, ela obnubila o desenho estrategico e dificulta enfrentar essa ameaca eficazmente. Chama-se a atencao para o uso politico cada vez mais frequente desse termo para criminalizar grupos e movimentos sociais contestatarios, pois assim se pretende legitimar todo tipo de meios de combate, inclusive a tortura. Por isso propoe-se limitar o emprego do termo “terrorista” como adjetivo que qualifique certas acoes violentas e evitar substantiva-la em grupos ou estrategias. Finalmente propoe-se mais uma vez a abordagem “vitimologica” ao estudo do “terrorismo”, por sua fertilidade heuristica e capacidade explanatoria de certas formas de violencia.
In Vitro Antiplasmodial Activity of Sesquiterpene Lactones from Ambrosia tenuifolia

The in vitro antiplasmodial activity of Ambrosia tenuifolia organic extract and its isolated sesquiterpene lactones, psilostachyin and peruvin, has been evaluated against Plasmodium falciparum F32 and W2 strains. The cytotoxicity of both compounds was determined on lymphoid cells, and their corresponding selectivity indexes (SIs) were calculated. Peruvin was the most active compound on F32 strain of P. falciparum with a 50% inhibitory concentration value (IC50) of 0.3 μg/mL (1.1 μM) whereas psilostachyin showed activity on both strains (IC50 = 0.6 (2.1 μM) and 1.8 μg/mL (6.4 μM)). Fifty percent cytotoxic concentration (CC50) values (48 h) were 6.8 μg/mL (24.3 μM) and 10.0 μg/mL (37.9 μM) for psilostachyin and peruvin, respectively.
Degradation of serum amyloid A protein by surface-associated enzymes of human blood monocytes

Peripheral blood monocytes incubated in a serum-free medium degraded serum amyloid A (SAA) protein along three pathways. Of 20 normal subjects, 8 degraded SAA completely with no detectable intermediates. Eight subjects transiently produced an amyloid A (AA)-like intermediate which comigrated on sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) with tissue AA protein and reacted with antisera to AA, whereas four subjects yielded a persistent AA-like intermediate on PAGE. This group also failed to degrade tissue AA protein. Cells from 10 patients with amyloidosis fell into the second group. The responsible enzymes appear to be serine proteases because they are inhibited by disopropyl fluorophosphate. They were not affected by epsilon-amino caproic acid, L-1-tosylamide-2-phenylethyl chloromethyl ketone, or N-alpha-p-tosyl-L-lysine chlormethyl ketone. It appears possible that the enzymes are associated with the outer membrane of the cell because only a small fraction of the activity is secreted into the medium and because enzyme activity remains after fixation of the cells with glutaraldehyde which completely stops phagocytosis. Perhaps differences in patterns of proteolysis may play a role in the predisposition to amyloidosis.
Combining Speech and Handwriting Modalities for Mathematical Expression Recognition

In this paper, we open new perspectives for mathematical expression recognition by introducing an original bimodal system. Since handwritten mathematical expression recognition is a very challenging task prone to many ambiguities, we use speech as an additional modality to circumvent limitations that are inherent to the written form. A use case scenario corresponds to lectures given in classrooms where the teacher would write and read aloud any mathematical expressions to allow a better interpretation. In addition to state-of-the-art solutions for recognizing handwriting and speech, we introduce a multilayer architecture for the merger of modalities. Specifically, the Dempster–Shafer theory is used to process the information at the symbol level. This bimodal system is evaluated on real bimodal data, the HAMEX dataset. Large improvements are observed when speech and handwriting are combined when compared to the single handwriting modality.