Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance comparison of 6T SRAM cell using bulk MOSFET and double gate (DG) MOSFET

In recent technologies, device scaling leads to increase in dynamic power, sub threshold leakage, and degradation of noise margins which are vital obstacles in future generation memory circuits. This paper explores the design of a 6T cell of SRAM. A low power, large SNM 6T cell using conventional MOSFET and DG MOSFET is designed and the results of simulation using ATLAS shows that a 6T cell using DG MOSFET gives better performance compared to conventional MOSFET in terms of SNM even at low supply voltages down to 0.3V.
The allocation problem with submodular utility functions (preliminary version)

We consider the problem of maximizing welfare when allocating items to players with submodular utility functions. Our main result is a way of rounding any fractional solution to a linear programming relaxation to this problem so as to give a feasible solution of welfare at least 1i1=e+† of the value of the fractional solution, where † > 0 is some flxed constant. This resolves the question of whether the previous approximation ratio of 1 i 1=e (for which there now are three difierent proofs, one in Dobzinski and Schapira [Soda 2006], one in Feige [2006], and one mentioned in the current paper) is best possible. We also show that the maximum welfare problem with submodular utilities is NP-hard to approximate within a ratio better than ‰ < 1, and moreover, this holds even when for each player there are only a constant number of items that have nonzero utility. The constant size restriction on utility functions makes it easy for players to e‐ciently answer any "reasonable" query about their utility functions. In contrast, for classes of instances that were used for previous hardness of approximation results, we present an incentive compatible (in expectation) mechanism based on fair division queries that achieves maximum welfare.
Are palaeoscolecids ancestral ecdysozoans?

SUMMARY The reconstruction of ancestors is a central aim of comparative anatomy and evolutionary developmental biology, not least in attempts to understand the relationship between developmental and organismal evolution. Inferences based on living taxa can and should be tested against the fossil record, which provides an independent and direct view onto historical character combinations. Here, we consider the nature of the last common ancestor of living ecdysozoans through a detailed analysis of palaeoscolecids, an early and extinct group of introvert‐bearing worms that have been proposed to be ancestral ecdysozoans. In a review of palaeoscolecid anatomy, including newly resolved details of the internal and external cuticle structure, we identify specific characters shared with various living nematoid and scalidophoran worms, but not with panarthropods. Considered within a formal cladistic context, these characters provide most overall support for a stem‐priapulid affinity, meaning that palaeoscolecids are far‐removed from the ecdysozoan ancestor. We conclude that previous interpretations in which palaeoscolecids occupy a deeper position in the ecdysozoan tree lack particular morphological support and rely instead on a paucity of preserved characters. This bears out a more general point that fossil taxa may appear plesiomorphic merely because they preserve only plesiomorphies, rather than the mélange of primitive and derived characters anticipated of organisms properly allocated to a position deep within animal phylogeny.
Omega-1, a glycoprotein secreted by Schistosoma mansoni eggs, drives Th2 responses

Soluble egg antigens of the parasitic helminth Schistosoma mansoni (S. mansoni egg antigen [SEA]) induce strong Th2 responses both in vitro and in vivo. However, the specific molecules that prime the development of Th2 responses have not been identified. We report that omega-1, a glycoprotein which is secreted from S. mansoni eggs and present in SEA, is capable of conditioning human monocyte-derived dendritic cells in vitro to drive T helper 2 (Th2) polarization with similar characteristics as whole SEA. Furthermore, using IL-4 dual reporter mice, we show that both natural and recombinant omega-1 alone are sufficient to generate Th2 responses in vivo, even in the absence of IL-4R signaling. Finally, omega-1–depleted SEA displays an impaired capacity for Th2 priming in vitro, but not in vivo, suggesting the existence of additional factors within SEA that can compensate for the omega-1–mediated effects. Collectively, we identify omega-1, a single component of SEA, as a potent inducer of Th2 responses.
EFFECT OF WATER-CEMENT RATIO ON CORROSION OF REINFORCED CONCRETE

Corrosion of reinforced concrete is one of the major problems in the construction industry causing premature deterioration of concrete structures well before their service life. This has placed incredible financial burden on many projects and also placed safety of users at risk. A research work was carried out to evaluate the effect of water cement ratio on corrosion of steel in reinforced concrete structures. Eighteen samples in three groups of six samples each with three different water cement ratios were prepared and tested. The size of each sample was kept as 40x40x160 mm and water cement ratios was 0.45, 0.60 and 0.75 for the three groups respectively. The test results indicated that by using an appropriate amount of mixing water, penetration of main corrosion causing agents like chloride ions and atmospheric carbon dioxide could be significantly reduced. It is also observed that a water-cement ratio of less than 0.6 shall give better corrosion resistance with increased compressive strength.
Blending Finite-Difference and Vortex Methods for Incompressible Flow Computations

We describe and illustrate numerical procedures that combine grid and particle solvers for the solution of the incompressible Navier--Stokes equations. These procedures include vortex in cell (VIC) and domain decomposition schemes. Numerical comparisons with pure finite-difference methods demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques for various flow geometries, bounded or unbounded.
Discovery of Excess O I Absorption toward the z=6.42 QSO SDSS J1148+5251

We present a search for O I in the spectra of nine 4.9 ≤ zQSO ≤ 6.4 QSOs taken with Keck HIRES. We detect six systems with N > 1013.7 cm-2 in the redshift intervals where O I λ1302 falls redward of the Lyα forest. Four of these lie toward SDSS J1148+5251 (zQSO = 6.42). This imbalance is unlikely to arise from variations in sensitivity among our data or from a statistical fluctuation. The excess O I occurs over a redshift interval that also contains transmission in Lyα and Lyβ. Therefore, if these O I systems represent pockets of neutral gas, then they must occur within or near regions of the IGM that are highly ionized. In contrast, no O I is detected toward SDSS J1030+0524 (zQSO = 6.30), whose spectrum shows complete absorption in Lyα and Lyβ over Δz ~ 0.2. Assuming no ionization corrections, we measure mean abundance ratios ⟨[O/Si]⟩ = -0.04 ± 0.06, ⟨[C/O]⟩ = -0.31 ± 0.09, and ⟨[C/Si]⟩ = -0.34 ± 0.07 (2 σ), which are consistent with enrichment dominated by Type II supernovae. The O/Si ratio limits the fraction of silicon in these systems contributed by metal-free very massive stars to ≲30%, a result that is insensitive to ionization corrections. The ionic comoving mass densities along the zQSO > 6.2 sight lines, including only the detected systems, are Ω = (7.0 ± 0.6) × 10-8, Ω = (9.6 ± 0.9) × 10-9, and Ω = (1.5 ± 0.2) × 10-8.
Extracting explanatory segments from Chinese product reviews via semantic pattern matching

Most previous studies on opinion mining have focused on sentiment classification and opinion extraction, little research has been done on mining the underlying reasons for opinions. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised semantic pattern matching method to explanatory segment extraction in Chinese product reviews. To this end, we first exploit chi-squares to compute lexical explanatoryness and thus extract a set of explanatory patterns from simple explanatory opinionated sentences. Then, we generalize these extracted explanatory patterns via word embeddings learned from online product reviews. Finally, we employ these generalized explanatory patterns to recognize explanatory segments in opinionated sentences. Experimental results over product reviews from mobilephone and car domains show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for explanatory segment extraction.
MULTI-CHANNEL IMAGE SOURCE SEPARATION BY DICTIONARY UPDATE METHOD

In real world, a large set of mixed signals are available from which each source signal need to be recovered and this problem can be addressed with adaptive dictionary method. In the case of multichannel observations sparsity found to be very useful for source separation. The problem exist is that in most cases the sources are not sparsified in their domain and it will become necessary to sparsify the source by using some known dictionaries. In order to recover the sources successfully a prior knowledge of the sparse domain is required, if not available this problem can be solved by using dictionary learning technique into source separation. The proposed method, a local dictionary is adaptively learned for each source separately along with separation. This approach improves the quality of source separation both in noiseless and different noisy situations. The advantage of this method is that it denoise the sources during separation. Keywords-Blind source separation (BSS); dictionary learning technique; multichannel morphological analysis; denoising; sparsity.
High performance work practices, organizational performance and strategic thinking

Purpose Drawing on a number of strategic management theories, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between strategic thinking (in other words, systems perspective, focused intent, intelligent opportunism, thinking in time and hypothesis-driven analysis) and organizational performance. It also investigates whether the notion and content of high performance work practices, as identified in developed countries, can be used to amplify the effects of strategic thinking within the banking industry in a developing country. Design/methodology/approach Utilizing cross-sectional data obtained from commercial banks in Jordan, this paper applied structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the banking sector in a developing country. Data were collected through self-administered questionnaires. Findings According to the results, focused intent, intelligent opportunism, thinking in time and hypothesis-driven analysis have positive impacts on organizational performance, except when considered from the systems perspective. Consequently, high performance work practices were found to only moderate the relationship between focused intent, intelligent opportunism, thinking in time and organizational performance. Originality/value The authors examined the impact of strategic thinking on the organizational performance through the moderation role of high performance work practices. The results of this paper extend the existing literature by providing evidence from Jordan, a developing country outside of the western world.
Low power error resilient encoding for on-chip data buses

As technology scales toward deep submicron, on-chip interconnects are becoming more and more sensitive to noise sources such as power supply noise, crosstalk, radiation induced effects, etc. Transient delay and logic faults are likely to reduce the reliability of data transfers across data-path bus lines. This paper investigates how to deal with these errors in an energy efficient way. We could opt for error correction, which exhibits larger decoding overhead, or for the retransmission of the incorrectly received data word. Provided the timing penalty associated with this latter technique can be tolerated, we show that retransmission strategies are more effective than correction ones from an energy viewpoint, both for the larger detection capability and for the minor decoding complexity. The analysis wits performed by implementing several variants of a Hamming code in the VHDL model of a processor based on the Sparc V8 architecture, and exploiting the characteristics of AMBA bus slave response cycles to carry out retransmissions in a way fully compliant with this standard on-chip bus specification.
Arsenic, Zinc, and Aluminium Removal from Gold Mine Wastewater Effluents and Accumulation by Submerged Aquatic Plants (Cabomba piauhyensis, Egeria densa, and Hydrilla verticillata)

The potential of three submerged aquatic plant species (Cabomba piauhyensis, Egeria densa, and Hydrilla verticillata) to be used for As, Al, and Zn phytoremediation was tested. The plants were exposed for 14 days under hydroponic conditions to mine waste water effluents in order to assess the suitability of the aquatic plants to remediate elevated multi-metals concentrations in mine waste water. The results show that the E. densa and H. verticillata are able to accumulate high amount of arsenic (95.2%) and zinc (93.7%) and resulted in a decrease of arsenic and zinc in the ambient water. On the other hand, C. piauhyensis shows remarkable aluminium accumulation in plant biomass (83.8%) compared to the other tested plants. The ability of these plants to accumulate the studied metals and survive throughout the experiment demonstrates the potential of these plants to remediate metal enriched water especially for mine drainage effluent. Among the three tested aquatic plants, H. verticillata was found to be the most applicable (84.5%) and suitable plant species to phytoremediate elevated metals and metalloid in mine related waste water.
Lactate Produced by Glycogenolysis in Astrocytes Regulates Memory Processing

When administered either systemically or centrally, glucose is a potent enhancer of memory processes. Measures of glucose levels in extracellular fluid in the rat hippocampus during memory tests reveal that these levels are dynamic, decreasing in response to memory tasks and loads; exogenous glucose blocks these decreases and enhances memory. The present experiments test the hypothesis that glucose enhancement of memory is mediated by glycogen storage and then metabolism to lactate in astrocytes, which provide lactate to neurons as an energy substrate. Sensitive bioprobes were used to measure brain glucose and lactate levels in 1-sec samples. Extracellular glucose decreased and lactate increased while rats performed a spatial working memory task. Intrahippocampal infusions of lactate enhanced memory in this task. In addition, pharmacological inhibition of astrocytic glycogenolysis impaired memory and this impairment was reversed by administration of lactate or glucose, both of which can provide lactate to neurons in the absence of glycogenolysis. Pharmacological block of the monocarboxylate transporter responsible for lactate uptake into neurons also impaired memory and this impairment was not reversed by either glucose or lactate. These findings support the view that astrocytes regulate memory formation by controlling the provision of lactate to support neuronal functions.
Bounds and Approximations for Multistage Stochastic Programs

Consider (typically large) multistage stochastic programs, which are defined on scenario trees as the basic data structure. It is well known that the computational complexity of the solution depends on the size of the tree, which itself increases typically exponentially fast with its height, i.e., the number of decision stages. For this reason approximations which replace the problem by a simpler one and allow bounding the optimal value are of great importance. In this paper we study several methods to obtain lower and upper bounds for multistage stochastic programs and we demonstrate their use in a multistage inventory problem.
Using Agent Technology as a Support for an Enterprise Service Bus

The research in distributed artificial intelligence has been addressing for several years the problem of designing and building coordinated and collaborative intelligent multiagent systems. This interesting and advanced work can be fruitfully exploited in the area of service-oriented computing if agent technology is appropriately engineered and integrated with the key technologies in this field. To support this claim, in this paper we show how the agent technology integrated in an Enterprise Service Bus allows the conception and realization of real flexible, adaptive intelligent service-oriented systems. Index Terms — Multi-agent systems, service oriented architecture, ESB, rule engine.
Financial Conditions Indices for the Turkish Economy

Since the end of 2010, Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey has adopted a new policy strategy which jointly uses liquidity, credit, and interest rate policies. The new framework has increased the need to develop and monitor a broad measure of “financial conditions” index that would complement the monetary policy analysis in assessing whether the overall set of policies are restrictive or accommodative. This note seeks to fill this gap by developing financial conditions indices for Turkey using a range of monetary and financial indicators.
Connection between causal and non-causal minimum mean-square errors in optimal linear filtering

Introduction: The optimal linear, minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estim a on of stationary, continuous-time signals from noise-corrupted ob servations is a classical signal processing problem, whose solution dates back to the work of Wiener i the 1940s [1]. As shown by Wiener, a lower bound on the MMSE achievable by any realisabl e (namely, causal) linear filter is obtained by considering the associated unrealisable (noncausal) filter, in which access to noisy measurements at all times t satisfying−∞ < t < ∞ is assumed. It is then a very straight1This paper is a preprint of a paper submitted to Electronics Lettersand is subject to IEE Copyright. If accepted, the copy of record will be available at IEE Digital Library.
Comparison of emergency cranial CT interpretation between radiology residents and neuroradiologists: transverse versus three-dimensional images.

PURPOSE Three-dimensional (3D) reformatted images provide a more inclusive representation of abnormalities than transverse images in cranial computed tomography (CT). The purpose of this study was to assess the value of 3D reformations for radiology residents in the interpretation of emergency cranial CTs. MATERIALS AND METHODS In total, 218 consecutive patients who underwent emergency cranial CT scans with 3D reformation were included in this retrospective study. Four blinded readers (three radiology residents and a neuroradiologist) interpreted the transverse and 3D images in two separate sessions. Each reader assessed 1) abnormal finding(s) and the confidence score(s) (5-point scale) for transverse and 3D images, 2) added value score of 3D images (5-point scale), and 3) interpretation time for both transverse and 3D images. We analyzed discordance between each radiology resident and the neuroradiologist on a lesion-by-lesion basis. RESULTS In total, 509 lesions were detected in 218 patients. Discordance rates between the three residents and the neuroradiologist were 11.4%-20.2% (mean, 15.0%) and 8.8%-16.9% (mean, 12.1%) in the interpretation of transverse and 3D images, respectively. Confidence scores were higher for 3D images than for transverse images for all readers. The added value scores for the 3D images were relatively higher for the inexperienced residents. Interpretation times for 3D images were significantly higher than for transverse images for all readers. CONCLUSION The 3D reformations assist radiology residents in the interpretation of emergency cranial CT examinations.
A Landmark-Free Method for Three-Dimensional Shape Analysis

Background The tools and techniques used in morphometrics have always aimed to transform the physical shape of an object into a concise set of numerical data for mathematical analysis. The advent of landmark-based morphometrics opened new avenues of research, but these methods are not without drawbacks. The time investment required of trained individuals to accurately landmark a data set is significant, and the reliance on readily-identifiable physical features can hamper research efforts. This is especially true of those investigating smooth or featureless surfaces. Methods In this paper, we present a new method to perform this transformation for data obtained from high-resolution scanning technology. This method uses surface scans, instead of landmarks, to calculate a shape difference metric analogous to Procrustes distance and perform superimposition. This is accomplished by building upon and extending the Iterative Closest Point algorithm. We also explore some new ways this data can be used; for example, we can calculate an averaged surface directly and visualize point-wise shape information over this surface. Finally, we briefly demonstrate this method on a set of primate skulls and compare the results of the new methodology with traditional geometric morphometric analysis.
Cognitive biases and addiction: an evolution in theory and method.

An evolution in theoretical models and methodological paradigms for investigating cognitive biases in the addictions is discussed. Anomalies in traditional cognitive perspectives, and problems with the self-report methods which underpin them, are highlighted. An emergent body of cognitive research, contextualized within the principles and paradigms of cognitive neuropsychology rather than social learning theory, is presented which, it is argued, addresses these anomalies and problems. Evidence is presented that biases in the processing of addiction-related stimuli, and in the network of propositions which motivate addictive behaviours, occur at automatic, implicit and pre-conscious levels of awareness. It is suggested that methods which assess such implicit cognitive biases (e.g. Stroop, memory, priming and reaction-time paradigms) yield findings which have better predictive utility for ongoing behaviour than those biases determined by self-report methods of introspection. The potential utility of these findings for understanding "loss of control" phenomena, and the desynchrony between reported beliefs and intentions and ongoing addictive behaviours, is discussed. Applications to the practice of cognitive therapy are considered.
Generation of a Common Reference String, secure against Quantum Adversaries, and Applications

In this paper, we present the generation of a common reference string “from scratch” via coin-flipping in the presence of a quantum adversary. First, we present how we achieve quantumsecure coin-flipping using Watrous’ quantum rewinding technique [Wat06]. Then, by combining this coin-flipping with any non-interactive zero-knowledge protocol we get an easy transformation from non-interactive zero-knowledge in general to interactive quantum zero-knowledge. Finally, we sketch how we can integrate quantum-secure coin-flipping into the currently proposed quantum protocols with hybrid security [DF09].