Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Unequal-Error-Protection Error Correction Codes for the Embedded Memories in Digital Signal Processors

In many digital signal processing applications, some parts of a word stored in the embedded static random access memories (SRAMs) are more important than other parts of the word. Due to the differences in importance, memory failures that occur in more important bit locations generally give rise to relatively larger system performance degradation than those in less important locations. This brief presents a low-complexity unequal-error-protection error correcting code (UEEP-ECC) approach for the embedded memories in digital signal processor. In the proposed UEEP-ECC, repetition code is combined with the Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem code to selectively provide stronger error correction capabilities on more important data portions without a large hardware overhead. An efficient UEEP-ECC generation algorithm that can find the UEEP-ECC code with a minimum power of memory core and ECC logics is also presented. The experimental results show that the UEEP-ECC scheme achieves considerable power savings and data quality improvements in both of the H.264 and fast Fourier transform applications.
iTalk A 3-Component System for Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is the text normalization from written input form to spoken output form, with applications in intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), voice-activated emails, and message readers for the visually impaired. In this project, we built a 3-component TTS text normalization system with token-to-token Naïve Bayes (NB) classifiers, a token-to-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, and hand-built grammar rules based on regular expression. The performance of this system reached a development accuracy of 99.36% and a testing accuracy of 98.88%. These results are comparable to those obtained by deep learning approaches. Keywords—Machine Learning; Natural Language Processing; Text Normalization; Support Vector Machine; Naïve Bayes
A novel approach of detecting Trojan based on network behavior analysis

Most existing approaches for detecting Trojan are limited for obfuscation and encryption techniques. In this paper, we present a network behavior analysis designed to address the limitations of previously-proposed approaches. Our solution considered not only transport layer characteristics but also network layer characteristics. The approach in this paper exhibits two major advantages: (1) can better represent Trojan network behavior, and (2) performed at very low computational cost. Based on clustering technique, we proposed a detection model that detects Trojan communication with high accuracy. We implement the model on real-world traces. The experiments show that our model is suitable for detecting Trojan communication amongst the vast amount of network traffic, with over 90% accuracy and less than 3.5% false positive rate. We confidently consider that our detection approach is complementary to the existing techniques.
A metacognição no ensino da álgebra: contrato didático e práticas pedagógicas (CO)

Esse trabalho objetivou investigar se em uma situacao ordinaria de sala de aula, a metacognicao e estimulada espontaneamente. Para tal, partimos dos dados coletados atraves da filmagem da aula da professora ‘Rosa’ (ALMEIDA, 2009). A coleta foi feita em uma sala de aula do 8° ano, de uma escola publica do municipio de Pesqueira-PE (Brasil) acerca do conteudo de equacao do 1o grau. Para analise das aulas da professora Rosa, tomamos como base a pesquisa desenvolvida por Araujo (2009). Os resultados confirmaram a relacao entre o desenvolvimento de estrategias metacognitivas e o contrato didatico, mostrando que um fator determinante para esse desenvolvimento e a utilizacao pelo professor de uma metodologia que estimule a reflexao dos alunos. Como tal metodologia nao e comumente encontrada no contrato didatico estabelecido nas nossas salas de aula de matematica, os alunos permanecem com o funcionamento no plano da cognicao e nao da metacognicao
Calcium Binding by the Essential Virulence Factor BAD-1 of Blastomyces dermatitidis*

BAD-1 (Blastomyces adhesin 1), a 120-kDa protein of Blastomyces dermatitidis, functions as an adhesin, immune modulator, and essential virulence factor. Structurally, BAD-1 is composed of a short N-terminal region, a core of 30 tandem repeats critical for virulence, and a C-terminal epidermal growth factor domain that binds the protein to yeast cell surface chitin. Each of the 30 acidic residue-rich tandem repeats contains a sequence that resembles the calcium-binding loop of the EF-hand domain found in many calcium-binding proteins. Here, we investigated the binding of calcium by BAD-1 and its biological significance. Yeast washed with double distilled H2O released surface-bound BAD-1, but EGTA washes were an order of magnitude more efficient, suggesting an interaction between BAD-1 and calcium. Immobilized BAD-1 was stained with ruthenium red dye, an indicator of calcium-binding proteins. In equilibrium dialysis, BAD-1 bound 45Ca2+ with an affinity of 0.41 × 10-5 m and a capacity of 27 calcium/mol. Mass spectrometry confirmed this capacity. Elevated [Ca2+] diminished BAD-1 solubility. Upon deletion of its C-terminal epidermal growth factor-like domain, BAD-1 resisted aggregation by elevated [Ca2+] but retained its affinity and capacity for calcium. Removing 20 copies of the tandem repeat, however, sharply reduced the capacity of BAD-1 for calcium. Growth of the bad-1 null yeast was inhibited by 5 mm EGTA, and re-expression of BAD-1 in trans or the addition of exogenous purified BAD-1 restored growth. Thus, BAD-1 is a high capacity calcium-binding protein. This property contributes to the structure and function of BAD-1, as well as to B. dermatitidis acquisition of calcium from the environment.
EFFECT OF CERTAIN NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES ON STOMATAL BEHAVIOR.

Although a great deal of research has been done on stomata, nevertheless, the facts regarding these important plant structures are still fragmentary and there are differences of opinion as to their fundamental characteristics. In 1895 Blackman (3) demonstrated the importance of stomata in gaseous exchange, although the possible relations of stomata to transpiration had long been recognized. Regarding the regulatory role of stomata in respect to transpiration, differences of opinion exist. That the stomata open and close periodically during twenty-four hours has been established. Various theories have been advanced concerning the mechanism of opening and closure and the cellular changes associated with these. According to some, the changes of starch to sugar and vice versa with consequent changes in osmotic relations are responsible for the opening and closure. Scarth (31), in recent years, has emphasized the importance of changes in the pH of the guard-cell vacuome due to changes in carbon dioxide content of the leaf, the opening and closure of the stomata being dependent directly or otherwise upon the effects of pH on starch-sugar changes or protein hydration, or both. Whatever eventually may be found to be the actual mechanism involved in the opening and closure of stomata, it is clear that the metabolism of the guard cells and the adjacent tissues must also be involved. While much attention has been given to the direct influence of light, of leaf water content, and of chemical reagents and reactions on stomatal behavior, no attention, except for the work of Pleasants (27), has been given to the part played by nutrients on stomatal behavior. There has been some work reported on the effect of nutrient deficiency on the rate of photosynthesis and respiration by Gruzit and Hibbard (11), Briggs (4), Lyon (20, 21), Gregory and Richards (8), and others. Since stomatal behavior through its effects on the loss of water and gaseous exchange may markedly influence plant behavior, a fuller knowledge of the effect of various factors on stomatal behavior is desirable. Of the factors that are of importance, theoretically and practically, that of mineral nutrient supply may be of considerable significance.
A Stabilized Mixed Finite Element Method for Elliptic Systems of First Order

A quasilinear elliptic equation of second order can be split into a first order system in various ways. We present and analyze a stabilized finite element method for the system, which is well suited for any of these possible splittings. Under minimal assumptions on the continuous solution, existence and (nearly) optimal convergence in $L^\infty$ of the discrete solutions is established. This result holds for any choice of the stabilization parameter $\omega>0$. Moreover, the paper presents a framework for investigating other mixed methods for unsymmetric first order systems.
Dielectric Resonator Based on Artificial Dielectrics and its Application to a Microwave BPF

We propose an evaluation procedure of arificial dielectrics and a disk resonator of novel structure. The permittivity can be calculated by using a commercial software and simple equations. A disk resonator made of anisotropic artificial materials has mode selectivity. The resonator is applied to a bandpass filter.
Training school principals, educating school governors

School leadership in England and Wales is legally shared between the full‐time principal and the part‐time volunteers, the school governors. Their professional development opportunities during the last ten years have taken opposite directions. Principals’ development has moved to a training focus, with a nationalised, standardised, competency‐based qualification for aspirant headteachers. Governors’ education remains a non‐standardised, decentralised system but has now become largely school‐based and centred on educational issues. In exploring why such differences have occurred, the reasons suggested concern differing role expectations, training developments in related occupations, centralisation and decentralisation, uncertainties about the objectives of educational leadership and the costs of professional development.
Evidence for a potential role of glucagon during eye growth regulation in chicks

Eye growth and refraction are regulated by visual processing in the retina. Until now, the messengers released by the retina to induce these changes are largely unknown. Previously, it was found that glucagon amacrine cells respond to defocus in the retinal image and even to its sign. The expression of the immediate-early gene product ZENK increased in this cell population in eyes wearing plus lenses and decreased in minus lens-treated chicks. Moreover, it was shown that the amount of retinal glucagon mRNA increased during treatment with positive lenses. Therefore, it seems likely that these cells contribute to the visual regulation of ocular growth and that glucagon may act as a stop signal for eye growth. The purpose of the present study was to accumulate further evidence for a role of glucagon in the visual control of eye growth. Chicks were treated with plus and minus lenses after injection of different amounts of the glucagon antagonist des-His1-Glu9-glucagon-amide or the agonist Lys17,18,Glu21-glucagon, respectively. Refractive development and eye growth were recorded by automated infrared photorefraction and A-scan ultrasound, respectively. The glucagon antagonist inhibited hyperopia development, albeit only in a narrow concentration range, and at most by 50%, but not myopia development. In contrast, the agonist inhibited myopia development in a dose-dependent fashion. At high concentrations, it also prevented hyperopia development.
Anti-L3T4 antibody treatment suppresses hepatic granuloma formation and abrogates antigen-induced interleukin-2 production in Schistosoma mansoni infection

In murine schistosomiasis mansoni, granulomatous inflammation is an immune response that involves egg antigen presentation to T cells in the context of class II major histocompatibility complex determinants and subsequent inflammatory lymphokine production by delayed-hypersensitivity (TDH) lymphocytes. In the present study, monoclonal antibodies directed against L3T4, I-A, and Lyt-2 molecules were injected intraperitoneally into S. mansoni-infected mice to study the role of these membrane antigens in the process of granuloma formation. A dramatic suppression of the hepatic granuloma size and antigen-induced interleukin-2 (IL-2) production by spleen cells was seen in mice that received anti-L3T4 monoclonal antibody treatment. The total number of cells, especially the L3T4+ T cells, was greatly diminished in the spleens. Furthermore, histopathological study of the granulomas in stained liver sections demonstrated the paucity of eosinophils and macrophages, absence of epithelioid cells and multinucleated giant cells, and minimal collagen deposition within the lesions. Damaged hepatocytes were also seen surrounding these ill-formed granulomas. In contrast, anti-I-A monoclonal antibody treatment partially suppressed IL-2 production, although granuloma size and cellular composition remained the same. Mice that received anti-Lyt-2 monoclonal antibody did not show any changes in either IL-2 production or hepatic granulomatous inflammation. The data presented in this paper indicate a crucial role for L3T4 molecules present on a subset of class II major histocompatibility complex-restricted TDH cells in IL-2 production and the generation of the granulomatous response.
How general practice is funded in New Zealand

Aotearoa Health, New Zealand. Laurence A Malcolm, MD, FRCPE, FFPHM, Professor Emeritus and Consultant. Lawrence A Malcolm is Professor Emeritus and former Professor of Community Health at the University of Otago. He has extensive New Zealand and international experience in health services development, especially in primary care. Reprints will not be available from the author. Correspondence: Professor L A Malcolm, Aotearoa Health, RD 1 Lyttelton, New Zealand. lm@cyberxpress.co.nz The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 19 July 2004 181 2 106-107 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2004 www.mja. com.au GP Funding — Viewpoints than 80% of practice income. In the early 1990s, the government introduced a services card” (CSC) for people on below-average i rently, the threshold for this is NZ$21 913 for a sing NZ$31 225 for a married couple, and rises wit children. The CSC entitles holders to higher subsid for prescriptions, but the quid pro quo was the r ow up Ge H general practice is funded in New Zealand depends on an answer to the question “This week or next? ”! neral practice, and primary healthcare generally, is currently undergoing a revolution greater than anything since the early 1940s, when government funding of general practitioners was introduced. GPs then successfully argued for the “sacred” right to charge a fee commensurate with their services, making them unique compared with similar countries, including Australia. Substantial patient copayments resulted, rising at times to more
Time-limited psychotherapy for whom.

SHORT-TERM psychotherapy has been described as an effective method for treating many psychiatric patients. Good results have been reported with a number of different techniques. 1-5 In most reports, however, success has been described not measured. The general purpose of this study was to measure patients' response to a recently instituted time-limited (TL) psychotherapy program. The study had three specific goals: (1) to determine if change occurred during the TL treatment period; (2) to test whether criterion measures useful in evaluating other brief treatments would prove sensitive to change following TL treatment; and (3) to determine what patient characteristics related either to treatment success or to treatment failure. Method The Treatment . —The study was conducted at the Psychiatric Clinic of the Boston University Medical Center. The clinic has adopted a TL treatment period of 12 hours. 6 Although the 12 hours may be arranged
Buried in the Middle but Guilty: Intronic Mutations in the TCIRG1 Gene Cause Human Autosomal Recessive Osteopetrosis

Autosomal recessive osteopetrosis (ARO) is a rare genetic bone disease with genotypic and phenotypic heterogeneity, sometimes translating into delayed diagnosis and treatment. In particular, cases of intermediate severity often constitute a diagnostic challenge and represent good candidates for exome sequencing. Here, we describe the tortuous path to identification of the molecular defect in two siblings, in which osteopetrosis diagnosed in early childhood followed a milder course, allowing them to reach the adult age in relatively good conditions with no specific therapy. No clearly pathogenic mutation was identified either with standard amplification and resequencing protocols or with exome sequencing analysis. While evaluating the possible impact of a 3'UTR variant on the TCIRG1 expression, we found a novel single nucleotide change buried in the middle of intron 15 of the TCIRG1 gene, about 150 nucleotides away from the closest canonical splice site. By sequencing a number of independent cDNA clones covering exons 14 to 17, we demonstrated that this mutation reduced splicing efficiency but did not completely abrogate the production of the normal transcript. Prompted by this finding, we sequenced the same genomic region in 33 patients from our unresolved ARO cohort and found three additional novel single nucleotide changes in a similar location and with a predicted disruptive effect on splicing, further confirmed in one of them at the transcript level. Overall, we identified an intronic region in TCIRG1 that seems to be particularly prone to splicing mutations, allowing the production of a small amount of protein sufficient to reduce the severity of the phenotype usually associated with TCIRG1 defects. On this basis, we would recommend including TCIRG1 not only in the molecular work‐up of severe infantile osteopetrosis but also in intermediate cases and carefully evaluating the possible effects of intronic changes. © 2015 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
Memory carving can finally unveil your embedded personal data

Smart cards are involved in most of activities, and they gather and record plenty of personal data. A manual interpretation of these raw data is difficult without specifications. This task becomes really tedious applied to plenty of devices. The paper introduces the first method to automatically retrieve textual information from memory dumps of smart cards. Given the data structure and encoding are assumed to be unknown, the method is based on text statistics and characteristics of smart cards to discard false positives. The experiments performed on more than 350 memory dumps revealed that the method can automatically retrieve more than 99% of textual information available in a dump, while keeping the false positive rate as low as 5.5%.
An efficient beam-propagation method for pulse propagation modelling of photonic crystal MMI devices

A finite difference ADIM-based TD-BPM technique with the Pade (1, 1) approximation is investigated and programmed for the purpose of designing and realizing the novel devices based on the photonic crystal multimode interference waveguides. Compared with the conventional numerical method, the present method can achieve the accuracy in the same order but with much coarser mesh sizes, which means the faster in computation speed and less in memory requirements. The propagation properties of a photonic crystal transmission line and two power splitters are successfully simulated, which validates the correctness and effectiveness of our newly-developed programs and shows its promising potentials in the design of the compact and low-loss filters, directional couplers and power dividers in sub-millimeter and Terahertz regimes.
Interpolation de points de vue : approches directe et variationnelle

Nous abordons la problematique d'interpolation de points de vue a partir d'une paire d'images stereoscopique. Ces techniques comportent generalement 3 etapes : l'estimation des correspondances entre les vues, le dosage des contributions de chaque image dans la vue finale, et le rendu. D'un cote, tandis que l'etat de l'art est tres vaste dans l'estimation des correspondances, nous trouvons peu de travaux formels analysant quel est le "bon" dosage des contributions lors du melange des images. D'un autre cote, concernant le rendu de nouveaux points de vue nous identifions deux groupes de methodes bien distincts, les methodes "directes", et les methodes "variationnelles". Nous conduisons une etude pour analyser la performance des facteurs de dosage ainsi que l'impact de la methode utilisee sur le resultat final obtenu. Nous evaluons ces methodes sur des scenes lambertiennes et non-lambertiennes afin de voir, dans chaque cas, quel choix est le plus pertinent.
Independent trafficking of flavocytochrome b558 and myeloperoxidase to phagosomes during phagocytosis visualised by energy‐filtering and energy‐dispersive spectroscopy‐scanning transmission electron microscopy

When polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMNs) phagocytose opsonised zymosan particles (OPZ), free radicals and reactive oxygen species (ROS) are formed in the phagosomes. ROS production is mediated by NADPH oxidase (Nox), which transfers electrons in converting oxygen to superoxide (O2−). Nox‐generated O2− is rapidly converted to other ROS. Free radical‐forming secretory vesicles containing the Nox redox center flavocytochrome b558, a membrane protein, and azurophil granules with packaged myeloperoxidase (MPO) have been described. Presuming the probable fusion of these vesicular and granular organelles with phagosomes, the translation process of the enzymes was investigated using energy‐filtering and energy‐dispersive spectroscopy‐scanning transmission electron microscopy. In this work, the primary method for imaging cerium (Ce) ions demonstrated the localisation of H2O2 generated by phagocytosing PMNs. The MPO activity of the same PMNs was continuously monitored using 0.1% 3,3′‐diaminobenzidine‐tetrahydrochloride (DAB) and 0.01% H2O2. A detailed view of these vesicular and granular structures was created by overlaying each electron micrograph with pseudocolors: blue for Ce and green for nitrogen (N).
Time optimal steering for a mobile robot along a given path

We present an open loop control design allowing to steer in a minimum time a wheeled robot along a prespecified smooth geometric path, between arbitrary given postures, while satisfying a set of dynamical constraints, such as actuator saturation or maximum admissible accelerations. Using the concept of “differential flatness” the problem is shown to be equivalent to the selection of the optimal time parametrization of the given geometric path. Using the inverse of the time derivative of this parametrization as the decision variable, the problem reduces to a convex minimization problem, which can be solved as a finite parameter optimization problem.