Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Generic and Extensible Core and Prototype of Consistent, Distributed, and Resilient LIS

The majority of the existing land information systems (LIS) are centralized, transaction processing systems based on object-relational database management systems for data storage, management, and retrieval. These traditional database management systems are dominantly based on a share-everything or share disk architecture and face challenges in meeting the performance and scalability requirements of distributed, data-intensive systems, including LIS. They support vertical, rather than horizontal scalability, which is of particular importance in distributed systems. In some cases, due to legal, administrative, or infrastructure constraints, LIS need to be distributed rather than centralized systems. Distributed computing systems and share-nothing architecture have become very popular, including new data processing platforms and frameworks with horizontal scalability and fault tolerance capabilities. In this paper, we present cdrLIS—a generic and extensible core of LIS based on relevant international standards and the NewSQL database management system (DBMS) that enables the implementation of consistent, distributed, highly-available, and resilient LIS. A generic core is implemented in the Go programming language and can be easily extended and adopted towards the implementation of a specific country profile. cdrLIS can be deployed either on a computer cluster or on cloud computing platforms and thus support the design and building of a new generation of distributed and resilient data-intensive applications and information systems in the land administration domain.
Macrobenthic animal assemblages of the continental margin off Chile (22° to 42°S)

A quantitative study of macrobenthos was carried out on three transects on the shelf and continental slope off Chile (22° to 42°S; from 100 to 2000 m water depth) within and beneath the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ). Macrobenthos mean densities ranged from 104 to 13 808 ind m−2, with highest values off Concepción (∼36°S), where highest chloroplastic pigment equivalents were also measured. Polychaetes were the numerically dominant group in all transects and depths, followed by peracarid crustaceans. Species richness and diversity correlated with observed changes in bottom-water oxygen concentrations and sediment-bound pigments. Our results show that the shelf macrobenthic communities were negatively affected by low oxygen. The non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) analysis evidenced depth-related station groups which may be related to the different environments provided by the water masses involved. Indeed, the depth ranges of stations groups with their specific species inventories coincide quite well with the boundaries of the three important water masses in the region, the Equatorial Subsurface Water (∼50 m to ∼400 m depth), the Antarctic Intermediate Water (∼400 to ∼1200 m depth), and the Pacific Deep Water (>1200 m depth).
SplitKV: Splitting IO Paths for Different Sized Key-Value Items with Advanced Storage Devices

Modern advanced storage devices, such as modern NVMe SSD and non-volatile memory based persistent memory (PM), provide different access features when data size varies. Existing key-value stores adopt uniﬁed IO path for all key-value items, which cannot fully exploit the advantages of different advanced storage devices. In this paper, we propose to split IO paths for different sized key-value items. We let small key-value items be written directly to PM and then migrated to SSD. Meanwhile, large key-value items are directly written to SSD. We present and discuss design choices towards challenging issues of splitting IO paths. We build SplitKV, a key-value store prototype to show the beneﬁts of splitting IO paths. The preliminary results show SplitKV outperforms RocksDB, KVell, and NoveLSM under small-large KV mixed workloads.
A Deeper Look at Poverty

In order to be effective, Christian development practitioners need to have a comprehensive understanding of poverty informed by the concepts and definitions used by the poor themselves. Far too often, this is not the case. Research shows that community level understandings of poverty encompass a gamut of relational, material, cultural, psychological, and spiritual variables that are often overlooked, and that need to be taken into account for more effective holistic, transformational development to take place.
Multiple origins of the endemic Australian Macrobrachium (Decapoda:Palaemonidae) based on 16S rRNA mitochondrial sequences

The evolutionary relationships of the freshwater prawn genus Macrobrachium are obscure. Members of this genus are widely distributed across tropical and subtropical regions. The phylogenetic relationships among the seven endemic and six non-endemic Australian Macrobrachium, along with five non-Australian species, were inferred from the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene sequences. Methods of analysis yielded phylogenetic trees of differing topologies; however, none supported a monophyletic origin for endemic Australian Macrobrachium. Enforced monophyly of a single origin of endemic Macrobrachium was statistically tested and rejected. These results support the view that the endemic Australian Macrobrachium arose from multiple origins. Previous biogeographical hypotheses related to the radiation of Macrobrachium into Australia are re-examined in the context of these results.
Data Portability Under GDPR: Technical Challenges

Right to data portability under GDPR enables individuals to request a copy of their personal data, also for exporting it to other service providers’ platforms. While WP29 has issued a guideline, there are many questions about how to implement this right effectively. In this paper, we will focus on some of the more technical challenges as well as some of the complex tensions that ensue due to existing descriptions of what the right should entail. The prior includes matters like determining the right format and implementing possibilities for direct transmission and API’s. The latter focuses on issues like distinguishing provided (raw) from inferred (derived) data; separating data obtained under consent or contract from other data collected under different legal grounds; determining harm against other individuals’ rights and freedoms and potentially redacting personal data automatically; and the challenge of implementing portability “without hindrance” while at the same time implementing “appropriate security measures” which are mostly obstructive by nature.
The long-run impact of new medical ideas on cancer survival and mortality

ABSTRACT We test the hypothesis that the arrival of new medical ideas played a major role in the long-run increase in US cancer survival and decline in cancer mortality, by investigating whether the types of cancer (breast, colon, lung, etc.) subject to greater penetration of new ideas, measured using the MEDLINE/PubMED database, had larger subsequent survival gains and mortality reductions, controlling for changing incidence. The 5-year survival rate is strongly positively related to the novelty of ideas in articles published 12–24 years earlier; evidence from case studies that it takes a long time for research evidence to reach clinical practice. Between 1994 and 2008, the 5-year observed survival rate for all cancer sites combined increased from 52.1% to 61.2%. The estimates suggest that about 70% of this increase may have been due to the increase in the novelty of medical ideas 12–24 years earlier. The number of years of potential life lost from cancer before ages 80 and 70 and the number of cancer deaths are inversely related to the novelty of ideas in articles published 12–24 years earlier, conditional on the number of patients diagnosed 1–10 years before and their mean age at time of diagnosis.
Could cloud storage be disrupted in the next decade?

If you were asked today “What are the three dominant persistent storage technologies used in the cloud in 2020? ”, you would probably answer HDD, flash and tape. If you were asked this question in 2010 you would have probably answered HDD, flash and tape. Will this answer change when you are asked this question in 2030?
Using virtual worlds to investigate perceived affordances on learned navigation and objective location performance

Navigation in virtual worlds is vital for users to move about effectively, complete objectives, and interact with one another and the environment. The ability to accurately orient oneself within a virtual world is essential for successful engagement in video games, simulations and learning environments. This study investigated the effects of perceived affordances on learned navigation and objective location performance within a virtual world. We hypothesized that such perceived affordances impede the learning of virtual geography by fostering reliance on “artificial” cues instead of real space navigation techniques such as the observation of landmarks, spatial orientation, sense of time and distance travelled. The presence of perceived affordances was not significant in predicting retention accuracy. However, the presence of perceived affordances was a significant predictor of objective location performance.
Gateway Selection in Millimeter Wave UAV Wireless Networks Using Multi-Player Multi-Armed Bandit

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based communications gained a lot of attention due to their numerous applications, especially in rescue services in post-disaster areas where the terrestrial network is wholly malfunctioned. Multiple access/gateway UAVs are distributed to fully cover the post-disaster area as flying base stations to provide communication coverage, collect valuable information, disseminate essential instructions, etc. The access UAVs after gathering/broadcasting the necessary information should select and fly towards one of the surrounding gateways for relaying their information. In this paper, the gateway UAV selection problem is addressed. The main aim is to maximize the long-term average data rates of the UAVs relays while minimizing the flights’ battery cost, where millimeter wave links, i.e., using 30~300 GHz band, employing antenna beamforming, are used for backhauling. A tool of machine learning (ML) is exploited to address the problem as a budget-constrained multi-player multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. In this setup, access UAVs act as the players, and the arms are the gateway UAVs, while the rewards are the average data rates of the constructed relays constrained by the battery cost of the access UAV flights. In this decentralized setting, where information is neither prior available nor exchanged among UAVs, a selfish and concurrent multi-player MAB strategy is suggested. Towards this end, three battery-aware MAB (BA-MAB) algorithms, namely upper confidence bound (UCB), Thompson sampling (TS), and the exponential weight algorithm for exploration and exploitation (EXP3), are proposed to realize gateways selection efficiently. The proposed BA-MAB-based gateway UAV selection algorithms show superior performance over approaches based on near and random selections in terms of total system rate and energy efficiency.
Multiangle Long-Axis Lateral Illumination Photoacoustic Imaging Using Linear Array Transducer

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) combines optical contrast with ultrasound spatial resolution and can be obtained up to a depth of a few centimeters. Hand-held PAI systems using linear array usually operate in reflection mode using a dark-field illumination scheme, where the optical fiber output is attached to both sides of the elevation plane (short-axis) of the transducer. More recently, bright-field strategies where the optical illumination is coaxial with acoustic detection have been proposed to overcome some limitations of the standard dark-field approach. In this paper, a novel multiangle long-axis lateral illumination is proposed. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to evaluate light delivery for three different illumination schemes: bright-field, standard dark-field, and long-axis lateral illumination. Long-axis lateral illumination showed remarkable improvement in light delivery for targets with a width smaller than the transducer lateral dimension. A prototype was developed to experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. In this device, the fiber bundle terminal ends are attached to both sides of the transducer’s long-axis and the illumination angle of each fiber bundle can be independently controlled. The final PA image is obtained by the coherent sum of subframes acquired using different angles. The prototype was experimentally evaluated by taking images from a phantom, a mouse abdomen, forearm, and index finger of a volunteer. The system provided light delivery enhancement taking advantage of the geometry of the target, achieving sufficient signal-to-noise ratio at clinically relevant depths.
Harmonizing Performance and Isolation in Microkernels with Efficient Intra-kernel Isolation and Communication

This paper presents UnderBridge, a redesign of traditional microkernel OSes to harmonize the tension between messaging performance and isolation. UnderBridge moves the OS components of a microkernel between user space and kernel space at runtime while enforcing consistent isolation. It retroﬁts Intel Memory Protection Key for Userspace (PKU) in kernel space to achieve such isolation efﬁciently and de-sign a fast IPC mechanism across those OS components. Thanks to PKU’s extremely low overhead, the inter-process communication (IPC) roundtrip cost in UnderBridge can be as low as 109 cycles. We have designed and implemented a new microkernel called ChCore based on UnderBridge and have also ported UnderBridge to three mainstream microker-nels, i.e., seL4, Google Zircon, and Fiasco.OC. Evaluations show that UnderBridge speeds up the IPC by 3.0 × compared with the state-of-the-art (e.g., SkyBridge) and improves the performance of IPC-intensive applications by up to 13.1 × for the above three microkernels.
SPINFER: Inferring Semantic Patches for the Linux Kernel

In a large software system such as the Linux kernel, there is a continual need for large-scale changes across many source files, triggered by new needs or refined design decisions. In this paper, we propose to ease such changes by suggesting transformation rules to developers, inferred automatically from a collection of examples. Our approach can help automate large-scale changes as well as help understand existing large-scale changes, by highlighting the various cases that the developer who performed the changes has taken into account. We have implemented our approach as a tool, Spinfer. We evaluate Spinfer on a range of challenging large-scale changes from the Linux kernel and obtain rules that achieve 86% precision and 69% recall on average.
The relationship between achene weight, embryo weight and germination in Taraxacum apomicts.

Apomicts provide the opportunity to investigate the variation in achene size and performance that is due to factors other than genetic differences between achenes. Achene characteristics of a single capitulum from each of 15 biotypes of apomicticTaraxacumwere investigated. Within a capitulum, achene fresh weight ranged from 4.45-fold to 13.74-fold. Overall, 59.8% of achenes germinated. The probability of any one achene germinating was influenced both by its source and by its weight and ranged from 0.049 to 0.902 between capitula and from 0.028 to 0.873 between weight classes. An investigation of the relationship between achene parts in three biotypes identified a linear trend for embryos to acquire a greater proportion of total achene weight as achene weight increases. Although the heaviest achenes showed the best germination, it is predicted that, for a given investment of maternal resources, seedling number would be maximized by producing achenes of a single intermediate weight.
StripeFinder: Erasure Coding of Small Objects Over Key-Value Storage Devices (An Uphill Battle)

Emerging key-value storage devices are promising because they rid the storage stack of the intervening block namespace and reduce IO ampliﬁcation. However, pushing the key-value interface down to the device level creates a challenge: erasure coding must be performed over key-value namespaces. We expose a fundamental problem in employing parity-based erasure coding over key-value namespaces. Namely, the system must store a lot of per-stripe metadata that includes the keys of all objects in the stripe. Furthermore, this metadata must be ﬁnd-able using the key of each object in the stripe. A state-of-the-art design, KVMD, does not quantify this metadata overhead [10]. We clarify that, when storing D data and P parity objects, KVMD stores D × P metadata objects, each of which stores D + P object keys. This nulliﬁes the beneﬁt of parity coding over replication in object count. For small objects, it might also nullify the beneﬁt in byte count; e.g., to protect 256 byte objects with 16 byte keys against two failures ( P =2), KVMD would cause byte ampliﬁcation of 2.8x ( D =4) and 3.3x ( D =8) vs. 3x with plain replication. We present an optimized version, StripeFinder, that signiﬁ-cantly reduces metadata byte and object counts; e.g., to protect 256 byte objects against two failures ( P =2), StripeFinder reduces byte ampliﬁcation to 1.9x ( D =4) and 1.6x ( D =8). However, even StripeFinder does not provide enough savings for 100 byte objects to justify its complexity over replication.
Alternated Trench-Gate IGBT for Low Loss and Suppressing Negative Gate Capacitance

A new gate structure in the trench-gate insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) design is proposed and analyzed for power-loss reduction and the suppression of electromagnetic-interference (EMI) noise. Although the turn-off loss and the ON-state voltage drop <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{\text {ce(sat)}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> are improved by the injection-enhancement (IE) effect, the IE effect caused dynamic avalanche that limits the turn-off loss reduction. In addition, EMI noise is induced by high <italic>dI</italic>/<italic>dt</italic> and large surge current due to the negative gate capacitance. This article shows that the dynamic avalanche and the negative gate capacitance can be suppressed by the management of the electric field concentration and hole current flow around the trench gate by the proposed alternated trench-gate (AT) IGBT structure, and both low power loss and good switching controllability can be obtained. The device simulation results show that the AT-IGBT improves the turn-on surge current <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${I}_{\text {surge}} - {V}_{\text {ce(sat)}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> tradeoff compared with the conventional IGBTs.
Study on Wideband THz Backward Wave Oscillator Driven by Pseudospark-Sourced Sheet Electron Beam

A backward wave oscillator (BWO) based on a double-staggered grating (DSG) slow wave structure (SWS) is investigated as a high-power wideband terahertz (THz) source, driven by a sheet electron beam emitting from a pseudospark plasma cathode. First, the DSG SWS is optimized in simulation to have a suitable dispersion characteristic. Then, the BWO with a wideband output structure consisting of a tapered section of DSG and an L-shaped connector is modeled under an operating voltage of 24–38 kV and a current density of 2– $5\times 10^{{7}}$ A/m2 (beam current of 1.5–3.8 A). A maximum power of 3.9 kW is obtained, and a wide bandwidth of over 38 GHz (343–381 GHz) is achieved. The impact of fabricating errors of the SWS on the performance of the BWO is analyzed in simulation. The effects of the plasma in the interaction space on the BWO performance are also analyzed, showing that the plasma causes an increase in the oscillation frequency by 1.0%–1.2%.
Prevalence of sclerotinia stem rot of canola in New South Wales

Surveys of petal infestation and stem infection conducted in 1998, 1999 and 2000 indicated that Sclerotinia sclerotiorum poses a threat to the Australian canola industry. Inoculum was present throughout all canola-growing regions of New South Wales and the stem disease was widespread throughout southern New South Wales. Percentage petal infestation increased over the 3 years surveyed with values ranging from 0 to 99.4%. The highest petal infestation values were observed in 2000 (maximum of 99.4%, mean of 82.2%), with lower mean values in 1998 (38.4%) and 1999 (49.6%). Stem infection ranged from 0 to 37.5% and most fields had less than 10% stem infection. Stem rot incidence before harvest did not relate to percentage petal infestation determined during flowering. This indicated that factors other than percentage petal infestation were important in influencing stem rot incidence. While there was no relationship between percentage petal infestation and stem rot incidence, stem infection never occurred without prior petal infestation.
piStar-ext: Supporting the Creation of iStar Extensions with the piStar tool

Many extensions have been proposed since the initial iStar version, in the 90's. We have been analysing these extensions and proposing ways to support new ones. In previous work, we have proposed extension mechanisms to iStar 2.0. Since modelling tools play a central role during the modelling of systems, we believe that a modelling tool that supports the creation of extensions through a graphical user interface could make this task easier. In this paper, we report on the results of supporting iStar extensions with piStar-ext, an iStar 2.0 web modelling tool. Our tool allows the proposal of new constructs using textual representation as well as new symbols. We illustrated our proposal by representing an existing iStar extension with the new features included in piStar-ext.
Security Aspects in Smart Meters: Analysis and Prevention

Smart meters are of the basic elements in the so-called Smart Grid. These devices, connected to the Internet, keep bidirectional communication with other devices in the Smart Grid structure to allow remote readings and maintenance. As any other device connected to a network, smart meters become vulnerable to attacks with different purposes, like stealing data or altering readings. Nowadays, it is becoming more and more popular to buy and plug-and-play smart meters, additionally to those installed by the energy providers, to directly monitor the energy consumption at home. This option inherently entails security risks that are under the responsibility of householders. In this paper, we focus on an open solution based on Smartpi 2.0 devices with two purposes. On the one hand, we propose a network configuration and different data flows to exchange data (energy readings) in the home. These flows are designed to support collaborative among the devices in order to prevent external attacks and attempts of corrupting the data. On the other hand, we check the vulnerability by performing two kind of attacks (denial of service and stealing and changing data by using a malware). We conclude that, as expected, these devices are vulnerable to these attacks, but we provide mechanisms to detect both of them and to solve, by applying cooperation techniques.