Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analog Circuit Design in Nanoscale CMOS Technologies

As complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies are scaled down into the nanometer range, a number of major nonidealities must be addressed and overcome to achieve a successful analog and physical circuit design. The nature of these nonidealities has been well reported in the technical literature. They include hot carrier injection and time-dependent dielectric breakdown effects limiting supply voltage, stress and lithographic effects limiting matching accuracy, electromigration effects limiting conductor lifetime, leakage and mobility effects limiting device performance, and chip power dissipation limits driving individual circuits to be more energy-efficient. The lack of analog design and simulation tools available to address these problems has become the focus of a significant effort with the electronic design automation industry. Postlayout simulation tools are not useful during the design phase, while technology computer-aided design physical simulation tools are slow and not in common use by analog circuit designers. In the nanoscale era of analog CMOS design, an understanding of the physical factors affecting circuit reliability and performance, as well as methods of mitigating or overcoming them, is becoming increasingly important. The first part of the paper presents factors affecting device matching, including those relating to single devices as well as local and long-distance matching effects. Several reliability effects are discussed, including physical design limitations projected for future downscaling. In some cases, it may be helpful to exceed foundry-specified drain-source voltage limits by a few hundred millivolts. Models are presented for achieving this, which include the dependence on the shape of the output waveform. The condition Vsb > 0 is required for cascode circuit configurations. The role of other terminal voltages is discussed, as Vsb > 0 increases both hot and cold carrier damage effects in highly scaled devices. The second part of the paper focuses on trends in device characteristics and how they influence the design of nanoscale analog CMOS circuits. A number of circuit design techniques employed to address the major nonidealities of nanoscale CMOS technologies are discussed. Examples include techniques for establishing on-chip accurate and temperature-insensitive bias currents, digital calibration of analog circuits, and the design of regulator and high-voltage circuits. Achieving high energy efficiency in ICs capable of accommodating 109 devices is becoming critically important. This paper also presents a survey of the evolution of figure of merit for analog-to-digital converters.
Fathers’ Postnatal Mental Health and Child Well-Being at Age Five

Fathers’ postnatal mental health is associated with emotional and behavioral outcomes for children in early childhood. The aim of this study was to examine whether parenting behavior mediated the relationship between fathers’ postnatal psychological distress and emotional–behavioral outcomes for children at age 5. The sample consisted of 2,025 fathers participating in Growing Up In Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Data collected when the children were aged 0 to 12 months and 4 to 5 years were used. Results revealed that the relationship between fathers’ postnatal distress and children’s outcomes was mediated by parenting hostility (angry and frustrated reactions toward the child such as yelling), and this remained significant after controlling for fathers’ concurrent mental health and mothers’ postnatal mental health. These findings underscore the important contribution of fathers’ postnatal mental health to later parenting behavior and child outcomes. Implications for policy and practice focused on improving mental health and parenting support to fathers in the early childhood period is discussed.
Coarticulació i assimilació en fonologia. Dades de moviment lingual sobre els grups consonàntics amb C2=/d/ en català

This paper uses the electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry technique (EMMA) for the investigation of tongue tip and tongue blade activity during the production of Catalan clusters consisting of consonants specified for adjacent places of articulation. C2 of these clusters is /d/ (a dental in Catalan); C1 is either an alveolar (/1/, /n/, /r/, /z/), a post-alveolar (/ ? /) or an alveopalatal (/ ? /). Apical and laminal trajectories for these clusters are compared to those for intervocalic /d/ and for intervocalic C 1. Data show the presence of a single dental articulation for /nd/ and /1d/ and of two sequential articulatory places (alveolar for Cl and dental for C2) in the case of the cluster /rd/. The clusters /zd/ and / ? d/ are produced with an alveolar place followed by an intermediate place between the dental and the alveolar zone, which indicates progressive co-articulatory effects (or even progressive assimilation) from Cl fricative onto C2=/d/. Finally, the production of the sequence / ? d/ involves presumably gestural blending resulting into an intermediate location between that for C1 and that for C2. The notion of «articulatory constraint» is discussed in the light of these results.
Breast‐milk Antimicrobial Factors of Rural Gambian Mothers: Influence of Season and Prevalence of Infection

ABSTRACT. The effects of season and variations in the prevalence of infectious disease on the concentrations and daily production of breast‐milk immunoproteins were studied in 152 rural Gambian mothers and their children up to 26 months post‐partum. IgA, IgG, IgM, C3, C4, lactoferrin, lysozyme and secretory component concentrations and breast‐milk volumes were measured longitudinally over a six month period which encompassed dry and rainy seasons. No increase in the production of any immunoprotein was observed at the time of maximum prevalence of serious infectious diseases, especially diarrhoea, in the children. Enhanced secretion of certain immunoproteins was noted in mothers of children aged 9–18 months at the beginning of the rainy season. There was some evidence that this may have been associated with skin sepsis, particularly impetigo, in the children. The production of most immunoproteins fell during the rainy season. This was not the result of declining maternal food intakes as similar decreases were seen for women receiving a dietary supplement.
Synthesizing Synchronous Elastic Flow Networks

This paper describes an implementation language and synthesis system for automatically generating latency insensitive synchronous digital designs. These designs decouple behavioral correctness from design performance by allowing any sub-component to dynamically stall without changing correct system activity. This is accomplished by imposition of global invariants and use of local control in the form of Synchronous-Elastic Flow (SELF) networks, which are directly synthesized. This design description format reduces the complexity of implementing correct SELF networks and does not require pre-design of a correct conventional synchronous design. The design description is a specialized guarded atomic action language which is particularly suited for succinctly describing SELF designs. We present the language syntax, semantics and synthesis techniques illustrated by the design of a latency tolerant cache controller.
Role of protein kinase A in GABAA receptor dysfunction in CA1 pyramidal cells following chronic benzodiazepine treatment

One‐week treatment with the benzodiazepine (BZ) flurazepam (FZP), results in anticonvulsant tolerance, associated with reduced GABAA receptor (GABAR) subunit protein and miniature inhibitory post‐synaptic current (mIPSC) amplitude in CA1 neurons of rat hippocampus. Because protein kinase A (PKA) has been shown to modulate GABAR function in CA1 pyramidal cells, the present study assessed whether GABAR dysfunction is associated with changes in PKA activity. Two days after 1‐week FZP treatment, there were significant decreases in basal (− 30%) and total (− 25%) PKA activity, and a 40% reduction in PKA RIIβ protein in the insoluble fraction of CA1 hippocampus. The soluble component of CA1 showed a significant increase in basal (100%) but not total PKA activity. Whole‐cell recording in vitro showed a 50% reduction in mIPSC amplitude in CA1 pyramidal cells, with altered sensitivity to PKA modulators. Neurons from FZP‐treated rats responded to 8‐bromo‐cAMP with a significant increase (31%) in mIPSC amplitude. Likewise, vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP), an endogenous PKA activator, caused a significant 36% increase in mIPSC amplitude in FZP‐treated cells. Neither agent had a significant effect on mIPSC amplitude in control cells. This study supports a role for PKA in GABAR dysfunction after chronic FZP treatment.
Perception of Emotional Responses to Social Interactions by Chinese and American Children

In the first stage of this study, groups of Chinese and American kindergarten children were asked to describe the kinds of situations that would make them feel happy, sad, afraid, or angry. Situations mentioned in each emotional category by both Chinese and American kindergarten children were written up as short stories and administered to second grade children from each cultural group. The responses of the Chinese and American second grade children to the social interaction situations were generally consistent with the spontaneous answers given by the kindergarten youngsters. The Chinese and American groups differed in that the Chinese second grade children perceived significantly more angry reactions whereas the American second grade children perceived significantly more sad reactions. An explanation was suggested on the basis of probable variations in child rearing practices in the two cultures.
Stress and coping in mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties: A test of Lazarus' transactional model of coping

The literature on psychological stress among women consistently points to the adverse effects of child rearing on mothers, particularly those caring for children with physical or mental handicaps. Early studies of the effects on family functioning of caring for a child with severe learning difficulties adopted a pathological approach in which it was assumed that psychological distress was inevitable among family members, particularly mothers. Recent research has emphasised that many families cope with and adapt to the stress they experience, and seeks to discover how they do so. The paper reports on a study of 166 mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties. The aim of the study was to investigate both the factors associated with maternal stress and those which might mediate or buffer the effects of stress. The study used the Folkman and Lazarus' (1979) transactional model of stress. Stress is the condition that results when person/environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy between the demands of a situation and his/her resources or ability to cope with those demands. The nature and type of coping generated by a person will be determined by the coping resources in the person's environment. The model identifies five categories of coping resource: utilitarian resources, health/morale, social networks, general and specific beliefs, and problem solving skills. In our study, the five coping resources were represented by the mother's social class and appraisal of her financial worries, physical health, social support, acceptance of and adjustment to the child, and assessment of coping skills. Stress was measured by the Malaise Inventory (Rutter, 1970). Four of the five coping resources were found to be significant contributors in a hierarchical regression analysis of stress scores, contributing additional variance beyond that of behavioural and other child characteristics. Altogether, 55% of the variance in stress scores was explained.
Changes in Event-Related Desynchronization and Synchronization during the Auditory Oddball Task in Schizophrenia Patients

Objective: We studied differences in the spatiotemporal dynamics of cortical oscillation across brain regions of patients with schizophrenia and normal subjects during the auditory oddball task using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). Methods: Ten right-handed male schizophrenia patients were studied. We used a newly developed adaptive spatial filtering algorithm optimized for robust source time-frequency reconstruction of MEG and EEG data, and obtained consecutive images in functional maps of event-related desynchronization (ERD) and synchronization (ERS) in theta, lower alpha (8–10 Hz), upper alpha (10–13 Hz), and beta bands. Results: Beta ERD power at 750–1000 ms in patients was significantly increased in large right upper temporal and parietal regions and small upper portions of bilateral dorsal frontal and dorsal-medial parietal regions. Theta ERS power in schizophrenic patients during the oddball task was significantly increased in the left temporal pole at 250–500 ms, and was significantly increased in dorsal, medial frontal, and anterior portions of the anterior cingulate cortex in both hemispheres, and the left portion of lateral temporal regions at 500–750 ms, compared to the control group (family-wise error correction p<0.05). Lower alpha ERS power was significantly decreased in the right occipital region at 500–750 ms and in the right midline parietal and bilateral occipital regions at 750–1000 ms. Upper alpha ERS power was significantly decreased in right midline parietal and left occipital regions at 750–1000 ms. Conclusions: ERD/ERS changes were noted in the left temporal pole and midline frontal and anterior cingulate cortex in theta ERS, occipital lobe in alpha ERS, and right temporal-frontal-parietal, midline frontal, and anterior cingulate cortex in beta ERD. These findings may reflect disturbances in interaction among active large neuronal groups and their communication with each other that may be related to abnormal cognitive and psychopathological function. Significance: Study of ERD and ERS by time-frequency analyses using MEG is useful to clarify data processing dysfunction in schizophrenia.
Decision Making and Uncertainty

Copyrighted 1992 by Mountainside Publishing. Current Publisher is Elsevier Science. David Henige has accused the library research community of claiming validity for research that, in fact, is no better than unjustified belief. Not only is most library research of this genre, claims Henige, but this fact may be clouded by tables of statistics that leave the reader comfortable in the notion that the conclusions are valid. He further claims that the research community has not been called upon to account for such shoddy research.
Parent Involvement in an Early Childhood Special Education Program: A Descriptive Analysis of Parent Demographics and Level of Involvement.

The present study was conducted to evaluate the level of parent involvement in an early childhood special education program in a large midwestern urban school district. Areas surveyed included parents' current input, participation, and desired level of participation in the initial eligibility evaluation, the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) meeting, and the initial Individual Education Plan (1EP). Additional areas assessed included parent-teacher contact, overall satisfaction with the early childhood program, and services the parent might be interested in receiving. Generally, parents were satisfied with their involvement and input in their child's educational program. Differences between parents' level of income, education, race, gender, and marital status and their subsequent level of involvement in their child's education were noted.
Rethinking reinforcement learning for cloud elasticity

Cloud elasticity, i.e., the dynamic allocation of resources to applications to meet fluctuating workload demands, has been one of the greatest challenges in cloud computing. Approaches based on reinforcement learning have been proposed but they require a large number of states in order to model complex application behavior. In this work we propose a novel reinforcement learning approach that employs adaptive state space partitioning. The idea is to start from one state that represents the entire environment and partition this into finer-grained states adaptively to the observed workload and system behavior following a decision-tree approach. We explore novel statistical criteria and strategies that decide both the correct parameters and the appropriate time to perform the partitioning.
Exploring Genomic, Geographic and Virulence Interactions among Epidemic and Non-Epidemic St. Louis Encephalitis Virus (Flavivirus) Strains

St. Louis encephalitis virus (SLEV) is a re-emerging arbovirus in South America. In 2005, an encephalitis outbreak caused by SLEV was reported in Argentina. The reason for the outbreak remains unknown, but may have been related to virological factors, changes in vectors populations, avian amplifying hosts, and/or environmental conditions. The main goal of this study was to characterize the complete genome of epidemic and non-epidemic SLEV strains from Argentina. Seventeen amino acid changes were detected; ten were non-conservative and located in proteins E, NS1, NS3 and NS5. Phylogenetic analysis showed two major clades based on geography: the North America and northern Central America (NAnCA) clade and the South America and southern Central America (SAsCA) clade. Interestingly, the presence of SAsCA genotype V SLEV strains in the NAnCA clade was reported in California, Florida and Texas, overlapping with known bird migration flyways. This work represents the first step in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying virulence and biological variation among SLEV strains.
Estimating Shadow-Rate Term Structure Models with Near-Zero Yields

Standard Gaussian term structure models have often been criticized for not ruling out negative nominal interest rates, but this flaw has been especially conspicuous with interest rates near zero in many countries. We provide a tractable means to estimate an alternative Gaussian shadow-rate dynamic term structure model that enforces the zero lower bound on bond yields. We illustrate this model by estimating one-, two-, and three-factor shadow-rate models on a sample of positive and near-zero Japanese bond yields. We find that the level of the shadow rate is sensitive to model fit and specification, including the number of factors employed.
On-cloth wearable E-nose for monitoring and discrimination of body odor signature

In this paper, we have developed a wearable electronic nose (e-nose) embedded on cloth for detecting the body odor of wearer, aiming to be a self-monitoring healthcare consumer electronics. This "smelling shirt" consists of eight on-fabric chemical gas sensors based on polymer/functionalized-SWCNTs simply fabricated by embroidering and drop coating process. Sew-able electronic modules based on LilyPad Arduino together with wireless ZigBee module were used for data acquisition and communication. The performance of the sensors has been tested by a selected set of volatile organic compounds as presented in the body odor, such as dodecane, 2-ethylhexanol, butyric acid, 6-Methyl-5-heptenone, nonanal and water. Discrimination of individual health status and analysis of the odor-print (or smell-print) of specific persons were confirmed by principal component analysis (PCA), which was found to be able to track change in the human body odor, thereby showing its potential to be applied for real-time point-of-care health monitoring.
Influence of Context on the Activation and Selection of Ambiguous Word Senses

The activation of ambiguous word senses was investigated by measuring the amount of interference in naming the ink color of a word that was either related or unrelated to one of the meanings of a preceding ambiguous word. In agreement with previous results obtained using this procedure (Conrad, 1974), evidence was obtained that both meanings of the ambiguous words are activated even in the presence of biasing context. However, contrary to previous findings, the degree of activation of each word sense depended on its degree of compatibility with the context. These results are consistent with a language processing system in which all interpretations of an ambiguity are accessed and then processed until an accurate determination has been made of which interpretation best satisfies the syntactic and semantic constraints that govern it.
The survival of the fittest: intensification, totalization and homogenization in Swedish competitive sport

The prestige words of the Swedish sport movement have with a long tradition been ‘sport for all’. The extensive funding from the Swedish government to organized sport through the Swedish Sports Confederation originates from that same ideal, but with the results presented in this text we argue that the inherent logic in competitive sport hampers the pronounced ambition to offer sport for all regardless of age, sex, social class, cultural origin and level of ambition. The results were based on an analysis of both elite and broad sports activities and show how the processes of Sportification, Intensification, Totalization and Homogenization combine in creating a standardized array of clubs, where the space for different ideas about activities, principles for organization and ideals for success shrinks along with the norms being set by the most successful clubs regarding competition and expansion. The main conclusion is that the ‘sport for all’-logic predominant in Swedish competitive sport since the beginning of the twentieth century has in recent decades been challenged by a competition- and expansion-logic which seems more rewarding in terms of ability to attract resources.
Parallel multi-objective evolutionary algorithms on graphics processing units

Most real-life optimization problems or decision-making problems are multi-objective in nature, since they normally have several (possibly conflicting) objectives that must be satisfied at the same time. Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) have been gaining increasing attention among researchers and practitioners. However, they may execute for a long time for some difficult problems, because several evaluations must be performed. Moreover, the non-dominance checking and the non-dominated selection procedures are also very time consuming. From our experiments, more than 99% of the execution time is used in performing the two procedures. A promising approach to overcome this limitation is to parallelize these algorithms. In this paper, we propose a parallel MOEA on consumer-level Graphics Processing Units (GPU). We perform many experiments on two-objective and three-objective benchmark problems to compare our parallel MOEA with a sequential MOEA and demonstrate that the former is much more efficient than the latter.
Some almost sure results for unbounded functions of intermittent maps and their associated Markov chains

We consider a large class of piecewise expanding maps T of [0; 1] with a neutral xed point, and their associated Markov chain Yi whose transition kernel is the PerronFrobenius operator of T with respect to the absolutely continuous invariant probability measure. We give a large class of unbounded functions f for which the partial sums of f T i satisfy both a central limit theorem and a bounded law of the iterated logarithm. For the same class, we prove that the partial sums of f(Yi) satisfy a strong invariance principle. When the class is larger, so that the partial sums of f T i may belong to the domain of normal attraction of a stable law of index p2 (1; 2), we show that the almost sure rates of convergence in the strong law of large numbers are the same as in the corresponding i.i. d. case.