Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Memoizing Multi-Threaded Transactions

There has been much recent interest in using transactions to simplify concurrent programming, improve scalability, and increas e performance. When a transaction must abort due to a serializability violation , deadlock, or resource exhaustion, its effects are revoked, and the transaction re -executed. For long-lived transactions, however, the cost of aborts and subsequent re -executions can be prohibitive. To ensure performance, programmers are often forced to reason about transaction lifetimes and interactions while structuring their code, defeating the simplicity transactions purport to provide. One way to reduce the overheads of re-executing a failed tran saction is to avoid re-executing those operations that were unaffected b y the violation(s) that induced the abort. Memoization is one way to capitalize on re -execution savings, especially if violations are not pervasive. Abstractly, if a procedurep is applied with argumentv within a transaction, and the transaction aborts, p need only be re-evaluated when the transaction is retried if its argumen t is different fromv. In this paper, we consider the memoization problem for trans actions in the context of Concurrent ML (CML) [20]. Our design supports mul ti-threaded transactions which allow internal communication through synchr onous channel-based communication. The challenge to memoization in the context is ensuring that communication actions performed by memoized procedures in the original (aborted) execution can be satisfied when the transaction is retried. We validate the effectiveness of our approach using STMBenc h7 [9], a customizable transaction benchmark. Our results indicate tha t memoization for CMLbased transactions can lead to substantial reduction in reexecution costs (up to 45% on some configurations), with low memory overheads.
Analysis of the cartilage proteome from three different mouse models of genetic skeletal diseases reveals common and discrete disease signatures

Summary Pseudoachondroplasia and multiple epiphyseal dysplasia are genetic skeletal diseases resulting from mutations in cartilage structural proteins. Electron microscopy and immunohistochemistry previously showed that the appearance of the cartilage extracellular matrix ECM in targeted mouse models of these diseases is disrupted; however, the precise changes in ECM organization and the pathological consequences remain unknown. Our aim was to determine the effects of matrilin-3 and COMP mutations on the composition and extractability of ECM components to inform how these detrimental changes might influence cartilage organization and degeneration. Cartilage was sequentially extracted using increasing denaturants and the extraction profiles of specific proteins determined using SDS-PAGE/Western blotting. Furthermore, the relative composition of protein pools was determined using mass spectrometry for a non-biased semi-quantitative analysis. Western blotting revealed changes in the extraction of matrilins, COMP and collagen IX in mutant cartilage. Mass spectrometry confirmed quantitative changes in the extraction of structural and non-structural ECM proteins, including proteins with roles in cellular processes such as protein folding and trafficking. In particular, genotype-specific differences in the extraction of collagens XII and XIV and tenascins C and X were identified; interestingly, increased expression of several of these genes has recently been implicated in susceptibility and/or progression of murine osteoarthritis. We demonstrated that mutation of matrilin-3 and COMP caused changes in the extractability of other cartilage proteins and that proteomic analyses of Matn3 V194D, Comp T585M and Comp DelD469 mouse models revealed both common and discrete disease signatures that provide novel insight into skeletal disease mechanisms and cartilage degradation.
Autoantibodies to glutamic acid decarboxylase in patients with epilepsy are associated with low cortical GABA levels

Antibodies to glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), the major pathway for the synthesis of γ‐aminobutyric acid (GABA) in humans, are found at elevated levels in a subgroup of patients with chronic epilepsy. To test whether the antibodies were associated with changes in cortical GABA levels we used magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Four patients with epilepsy and high serum GAD antibody levels (107–6,200 units/ml) and 10 healthy controls were recruited. A 3T GABA‐optimized spectrum was obtained from a reproducible voxel in the cortex. Compared to the control group, the patient group had significantly lower GABA concentrations within the cortex. Demonstration of an association between high serum GAD antibodies and low cortical GABA levels in patients with epilepsy suggests that GAD antibodies are, at least, a marker of a specific disease process and support a role for immune‐mediated GABAergic dysfunction.
Risk, Clinical Features, and Outcomes of Thrombosis Associated With Pediatric Cardiac Surgery

Background— Thrombosis, usually considered a serious but rare complication of pediatric cardiac surgery, has not been a major clinical and/or research focus in the past. Methods and Results— We noted 444 thrombi (66% occlusive, 60% symptomatic) in 171 of 1542 surgeries (11%). Factors associated with increased odds of thrombosis were age <31 days (odds ratio [OR], 2.0; P=0.002), baseline oxygen saturation <85% (OR, 2.0; P=0.001), previous thrombosis (OR, 2.6; P=0.001), heart transplantation (OR, 4.1; P<0.001), use of deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (OR, 1.9 P=0.01), longer cumulative time with central lines (OR, 1.2 per 5-day equivalent; P<0.001), and postoperative use of extracorporeal support (OR, 5.2; P<0.001). Serious complications of thrombosis occurred with 64 of 444 thrombi (14%) in 47 of 171 patients (28%), and were associated with thrombus location (intrathoracic, 45%; extrathoracic arterial, 19%; extrathoracic venous, 8%; P<0.001), symptomatic thrombi (OR, 8.0; P=0.02), and partially/fully occluding thrombi (OR, 14.3; P=0.001); indwelling access line in vessel (versus no access line) was associated with lower risk of serious complications (OR, 0.4; P=0.05). Thrombosis was associated with longer intensive care unit (+10.0 days; P<0.001) and hospital stay (+15.2 days; P<0.001); higher odds of cardiac arrest (OR, 4.9; P<0.001), catheter reintervention (OR, 3.3; P=0.002), and reoperation (OR, 2.5; P=0.003); and increased mortality (OR, 5.1; P<0.001). Long-term outcome assessment was possible for 316 thrombi in 129 patients. Of those, 197 (62%) had resolved at the last follow-up. Factors associated with increased odds of thrombus resolution were location (intrathoracic, 75%; extrathoracic arterial, 89%; extrathoracic venous, 60%; P<0.001), nonocclusive thrombi (OR, 2.2; P=0.01), older age at surgery (OR, 1.2 per year; P=0.04), higher white blood cell count (OR, 1.1/109 cells per 1 mL; P=0.002), and lower fibrinogen (OR, 1.4/g/L; P=0.02) after surgery. Conclusions— Thrombosis affects a high proportion of children undergoing cardiac surgery and is associated with suboptimal outcomes. Increased awareness and effective prevention and detection strategies are needed.
Self-Directed Learning And The Development Of Self-Efficacy In Basic Writing

SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SELF-EFFICACY IN BASIC WRITING by AMY ANN LATAWIEC May 2016 Advisor: Dr. Gwendolyn Gorzelsky Major: English (Rhetoric and Composition) Degree: Doctor of Philosophy This dissertation examines and analyzes the work of two sections of basic writing over the course of one semester. I explore relevant research in Writing Studies, Cognitive Psychology, and Educational Psychology to build a framework within which to discuss pedagogical strategies implemented to support student’s self-directed learning behaviors and to positively affect their efficacy beliefs. Through an analysis of students’ written work, I determined whether and how this pedagogy facilitated students’ articulation of efficacy beliefs as evidence through the language of their reflective writing assignments. Analysis of the data suggests three major arguments: first, that while self-efficacy is a complex construct to identify and analyze qualitatively, the multi-causal construct of goal articulation serves as a helpful tool with which to measure it; second, that students’ development and discussion of personal learning objectives – in which students break down those objectives into component parts making the monitoring of their learning accessible and task-based – appears to facilitate students’ use of multi-causality in their writing; third, that identifying task-based learning throughout the course of a semester can lead teachers and researchers to see students’ own language as it relates to their perceptions of success in a writing classroom.
Focus of Attention and Region Segregation by Low-level Geometry

Research has shown that regions with conspicuous colours are very effective in attracting attention, and that regions with different textures also play an important role. We present a biologically plausible model to obtain a saliency map for Focus-of-Attention (FoA), based on colour and texture boundaries. By applying grouping cells which are devoted to low-level geometry, boundary information can be completed such that segregated regions are obtained. Furthermore, we show that low-level geometry, in addition to rendering filled regions, provides important local cues like corners, bars and blobs for region categorisation. The integration of FoA, region segregation and categorisation is important for developing fast gist vision, i.e., which types of objects are about where in a scene.
Conditional Risk Minimization for Stochastic Processes

We study the task of learning from non-i.i. d. data. In particular, we aim at learning predictors that minimize the conditional risk for a stochastic process, i.e. the expected loss of the predictor on the next point conditioned on the set of training samples observed so far. For non-i.i. d. data, the training set contains information about the upcoming samples, so learning with respect to the conditional distribution can be expected to yield better predictors than one obtains from the classical setting of minimizing the marginal risk. Our main contribution is a practical estimator for the conditional risk based on the theory of non-parametric time-series prediction, and a finite sample concentration bound that establishes uniform convergence of the estimator to the true conditional risk under certain regularity assumptions on the process.
Introduction 1. Overview of the Thesis

Learning of network protocols has been studied in a project-based, internationally distributed, university course in computer systems taught jointly by two universities. The work presented in this thesis concerns students' understanding of network protocols 1. Insights into the students' understanding of basic concepts within computer networks have been gained through phenomenographic research approach. In this introduction I will explore the background and the goals of my research project. I will describe the framework in which my research is performed by giving an overview of the internationally distributed course – the Runestone initiative – its history and its aims, and by investigating the relationship between this project and related research projects. I will also describe some aspects of computer and data communication as well as of phenomenography, the research approach used in this project, that are relevant for the work presented here. The technical report Understanding computer network protocols (Berglund, 2002) is the core part of this thesis and will be referred to as "Paper A" throughout this introduction. The report presents empirically based results on how students who participate in the Runestone course understand network protocols. Students' understanding of some protocols that are used within the project as well as their experience of the general concept of network protocols are investigated, and different ways of experiencing the protocols are discerned. Some features that indicate some aspects of a good learning outcome are identified: to be capable of understanding a protocol in different ways and of making relevant choices between the ways it could be experienced according to the context in which it appears. The research is performed in a phenomenographic tradition. The aim of phenomenography is to analyse and describe qualitatively different ways in which a phenomenon can be experienced. It is thus an empirical research approach that puts the learner in focus, and the researcher studies the learners' ways of experiencing their study object, that is, what they are learning (Marton & Booth, 1997). Maintaining focus on the object of study is a feature of phenomenography that is important for my choice of a research approach. Phenomenography offers a possibility for me as a researcher to learn about computer science, as it is experienced by the students. Learning does not take place in a vacuum, but rather in a complex situation, where different aspects of the environment, together with the subject matter and the students 1 A (computer) network …
FANCJ suppresses microsatellite instability and lymphomagenesis independent of the Fanconi anemia pathway

Matsuzaki et al. generated and phenotypically characterized mice deficient for FANCJ and established that FANCJ functions either downstream from FANCD2 or in a parallel repair pathway. The findings presented support a model in which FANCJ counteracts the formation of secondary structures that arise during replication of microsatellite sequences, which minimizes the potential for strand slippage during DNA polymerization, thus implicating FANCJ as a key factor in human diseases.
A dynamic scheduling model for MANETs using order statistics

Though providing Quality of Service (QoS) for MANET is a challenge, it becomes a necessity because of its applications in critical scenarios. Users belonging to various profiles use MANETs for various purposes. Sometimes, even a low profiled user may need to send an urgent message in time critical applications. Hence providing prioritization based on user profile and urgency is necessary. In this paper we propose a Dynamic Differentiated, Delay threshold based priority model and MAC protocol for MANETs (3D-MAC). Our contributions are, calculation of dynamic urgency index to cater to urgent traffic, a novel scheduling model using order statistics to avoid starvation of low priority nodes, adjustment of contention window size during collisions to avoid packet drops and method to improve throughput of low priority, while the network has only low priority nodes. The model is simulated in ns2. We compare our results with the IEEE802.11e and justify that, our model gives 16% more average throughput during collision. Further, when Low priority nodes are only present in the network, their throughput is increased by 23%.
Progress on validity: the glass half full, the work half done

Describing a ‘lack of consensus’ and ‘a standoff’ (2015, p. 2), Newton and Shaw cast theoretical progress on validity as minimal. I see the collection of focal articles in this issue as much more encouraging. All appear to agree that concern about validity is fundamental to social science measurement. That agreement is also twofold: first, there must be evidence that the intended meaning of a test score is supported. (I, and others, have called the process of gathering this evidence validation of score interpretation.) Second, there should be evidence that the intended use is supported. Because these are different questions entirely, involving different values, different kinds and sources of evidence, and different standards, the process of gathering this evidence is distinguished as justification of test use. But the articles in this issue also illustrate viewpoints that anchor the ends of a continuum. At one extreme is the position that a multitude of vocabularies is needed to capture never-ending semantic or epistemological distinctions; this perspective views progress in validity theory as invoking ever finer distinctions regarding ever proliferating and interconnected facets of overlapping concepts and aims. I assert that expanding validities to address more varied and nuanced interpretations and stakeholders (Moss, 2015), developing categories to classify positions such as traditionalist, liberal, ultraconservative (Newton & Shaw, 2015) or ‘operating within a multiplicity of vocabularies’ (Markus, this issue) are not important pieces of theoretical puzzle, but puzzling pieces of doubtful theoretical import. At the other extreme is the position that no progress in validity theory is necessary; the existing conceptualisation – one that, ironically, has spawned lingering debate – is embraced as fully adequate, its adherents hopeful that more carefully explicated and repeated historical summaries or more strident apologetics for Messick’s (1989) viewpoint will eventually diminish discontent. Saddled with an outdated conceptualisation that has failed to produce either consensus or a single instance of the kind of unified conclusion about validity envisioned by Messick – that is, a conclusion that somehow synthesises evidence on both score meaning and test use into a singular statement about validity – adherents to the status quo viewpoint are relegated to recounting chronology that fixes the 1980s as the high water mark when validity theory was self-actualised.
JIRL: A C++ Toolkit for JPEG Compressed Domain Image Retrieval

Since there are few open image retrieval toolkits available, researchers in the field are often forced to re-implement existing algorithms in order to perform a comparative evaluation. None of the existing toolkits support retrieval of JPEG images directly in the compressed domain. The authors' aim is therefore to facilitate the use of compressed domain image retrieval techniques as well as ease retrieval evaluation by fellow researchers. For this purpose, the authors present JIRL, an open source C++ software suite that allows content-based image retrieval in the JPEG compressed domain and provides tools for benchmarking retrieval accuracy and retrieval time. In total, twelve state-of-the-art JPEG retrieval algorithms are implemented, while for each method techniques for compressed domain feature extraction as well as feature comparison are provided in an object-oriented framework. An example image retrieval application is also provided to demonstrate how the library can be used. JIRL is made available to fellow researchers under the LGPL v.2. 1 license.
Non-linear electrodynamics in curved backgrounds

We study non-linear electrodynamics in curved space from the viewpoint of dualities. After establishing the existence of a topological bound for self-dual configurations of Born-Infeld field in curved space, we check that the energy-momentum tensor vanishes. These properties are shown to hold for general duality-invariant non-linear electrodynamics. We give the dimensional reduction of Born-Infeld action to three dimensions in a general curved background admitting a Killing vector. The SO(2) duality symmetry becomes manifest but other symmetries present in flat space are broken, as is U-duality when one couples to gravity. We generalize our arguments on duality to the case of n U(1) gauge fields, and present a new lagrangian possessing SO(n) × SO(2)elemag duality symmetry. Other properties of this model such as Legendre duality and enhancement of the symmetry by adding dilaton and axion, are studied. We extend our arguments to include a background b-field in the curved space, and give new examples including almost Kahler manifolds and Schwarzshild black holes with a b-field.
Rotation invariant multi-model scene matching method based on spatial-temporal correlation

In this paper, a rotation invariant multi-model scene matching method is proposed for scene matching aided navigation system. Phase congruency transformation is introduced first to minimize the image difference between multi-model images. Then ring project transformation is processed to make the method invariant to rotation. However, multiple maximum phenomenon is likely to occur after ring project transformation. To solve this problem, a multi-frame spatial-temporal correlation matching method is proposed. Using the spatial-temporal correlation gained from the inertia system or matching of the adjacent inter-frames, an optimal matching position is gained by maximizing a multi-correlation surface. Afterward, surface fitting method is used to get sub-pixel accuracy matching position. This method, which is invariant to rotation, greatly increases match accuracy. Necessary simulation proves the efficiency of our method.
New, Improved, and Practical k-Stem Sequence Similarity Measures for Probe Design

We define new measures of sequence similarity for oligonucleotide probe design. These new measures incorporate the nearest neighbor k-stem motifs in their definition, but can be efficiently computed by means of a bit-vector method. They are not as computationally costly as algorithms that predict nearest neighbor hybridization potential. Our new measures for sequence similarity correlate significantly better with nearest neighbor thermodynamic predictions than either BLAST or the standard edit or insertion-deletion defined similarities already in use in many different probe design applications.
Population Average Gender Effects

In this paper I develop a consistent estimator of the population average treatment effect (PATE) which is based on a nonstandard version of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition. As a result, I extend the recent literature which has utilized the treatment effects framework to reinterpret this technique, and propose an alternative solution to its fundamental problem of comparison group choice. I also use the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition and its semiparametric extension to decompose gender wage differentials with the UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) data, while providing separate estimates of the average gender effect on men, women, and the whole population.
Constructing semantic network based on Bayesian Network

There is more and more video information on the web. The recognition of semantic information from visual content is an important task in video retrieval. Semantic network which captures the semantic relationships among concepts can be used for video annotation. In this paper, we present an improved three-phase dependency analysis (ITPDA) algorithm constructing Bayesian Network to automatically discover the relationship network among the concepts, and then we can use the constructed semantic network to annotate an unknown video shot. The advantage over the traditional three-phase dependency analysis (TTPDA) algorithm is that no requirement for the users to provide any node ordering. The system can automatically orient the edges of the network when users can not give a node ordering. The computation complexity is reduced from O(N4) to O(N2) (N is the number of nodes in the network) when orienting the edges. Experimental results show that ITPDA performs better than TTPDA algorithm in the application of automatic semantic video annotation.
A CIDADE EM MOVIMENTO: PRÁTICAS INSURGENTES NO AMBIENTE URBANO THE MOVEMENT IN CITIES: RISING PRACTICES IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT | CIUDAD EN ACCIÓN: LAS ACTIVIDADES CRÍTICAS EN EL ENTORNO URBANO

The aim of this article is to discuss the importance and influence of urban collectives in public spaces of Brazilian cities. It begins from the perspective that collective forms of action results from a set of contradictions manifested in the physical and existential space of cities. The development of these communities is related to several fields from social movements to studies on urban art. Thus, in order to conduct a vertical in‑depth study, the analysis will be developed in two sections. The first part provides a brief con‑ ceptual view of the new urban social movements and new forms of action in the urban matrix. The second is an analysis of the limitations and possibilities of two collectives: The Opavivara! (art and urban intervention) and Onibus Hacker (political movement