Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multicommodity flow, well-linked terminals, and routing problems

We study multicommodity routing problems in both edge and node capacitated undirected graphs. The input to each problem is a capacitated graph G=(V,E) and a set Τ of node pairs. In the simplest setting, the goal is to route a unit of flow for as many pairs as possible subject to the edge (node) capacity constraints. If the flow for a routed pair is required to be along a single path, it is the well-studied disjoint paths problem. If we allow fractional routings of the flow, it is known as the all-or-nothing flow problem. The nodes in Τ are referred to as terminals.In recent work [8,9], the authors obtained the first poly-logarithmic approximation algorithms for some edge routing problems. A key idea in these algorithms is to decompose an instance into a collection of instances in which the terminals are well-linked. Informally speaking, a set of nodes is well-linked in a graph if it does not have small separators. A decomposition into well-linked instances was previously achieved in [8] via räcke's hierarchical graph decomposition for oblivious routing [32]. In this paper, we design a simple new decomposition algorithm that is based on computing sparse cuts in a graph. Our new algorithm improves the earlier results for edge routing problems. Another important advantage of the algorithm is that it also applies to node-capacitated problems. We note that for oblivious routing with node capacities, an Ω√n) lower bound is known on the congestion [18], and hence the oblivious routing approach cannot yield poly-logarithmic bounds for well-linked decompositions. Using the new decomposition, we obtain a poly-logarithmic approximation for the node capacitated all-or-nothing flow problem in general graphs and node-disjoint path problem in planar graphs with O(1) congestion. We also show that the flow-cut gap for product multicommodity flows in node capacitated planar graphs is O(1), improving upon the O(log n) bound from [28].
A novel motion control design approach based on active disturbance rejection

A new digital control solution to motion control problems is proposed. It is based on a unique active disturbance rejection concept, where the, disturbances are estimated using an extended state observer (ESO) and compensated in each sampling period. The dynamic compensation reduces the motion system to approximately a double integrator which can be easily controlled using a nonlinear proportional-derivative (PD) controller. The proposed active disturbance-rejection controller (ADRC) consists of the ESO and the nonlinear PD controller and is designed without an explicit mathematical model of the plant. Hence, the controller is inherently robust against plant variations. Through the simulation, frequency response analysis, and hardware tests, it is shown that the proposed approach is superior to the current PID based technology. It stands out especially in handling set point change, large inertia and friction variations, and external torque disturbance, all of which is seen as "disturbance" by ADRC and is actively compensated. The improvement in transient response and steady state error is also quite evident.
Modular randomized byzantine k-set agreement in asynchronous message-passing systems

k-Set agreement is a central problem of fault-tolerant distributed computing. Considering a set of n processes, where up to t may commit failures, let us assume that each process proposes a value. The problem consists in defining an algorithm such that each non-faulty process decides a value, at most k different values are decided, and the decided values satisfy some context-depending validity condition. Synchronous message-passing algorithms solving k-set agreement have been proposed for different failure models (mainly process crashes, and process Byzantine failures). Differently, k-set agreement cannot be solved in failure-prone asynchronous message-passing systems when t ≥ k. To circumvent this impossibility an asynchronous system must be enriched with additional computational power. Assuming t ≥ k, this paper presents a distributed algorithm that solves k-set agreement in an asynchronous message-passing system where up to t processes may commit Byzantine failures. To that end, each process is enriched with randomization power. While randomized k-set agreement algorithms exist for the asynchronous process crash failure model where t ≥ k, to our knowledge the proposed algorithm is the first that solves k-set agreement in the presence of up to t ≥ k Byzantine processes. Interestingly, this algorithm is signature-free, and ensures that no value proposed only by Byzantine processes can be decided by a non-faulty process. Its design is based on a modular construction which rests on a "no-duplicity" one-to-all broadcast abstraction, and two all-to-all communication abstractions.
Identification of Web Information using Concept Hierarchies and On-line Updates of Concept Importance

The Internet users have to perform a lot of search to find web pages with relevant information. The paper proposes an approach for utilization of a hierarchy of concepts to perform identification of web pages in the environment of the Semantic Web. A user provides a hierarchy of concepts that can only partially "cover" their domain of interest. Ontologies related to that domain are used to instantiate the hierarchy with concrete information, as well as to enhance it with new concepts initially unknown to the user. A web page is checked against concepts from the hierarchy and activation levels of those concepts are aggregated using Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators that are part of the hierarchy of concepts. Mechanisms of aggregations embedded in OWA operators are determined using linguistic quantifiers and importance of concepts. The importance of concepts is constantly changing, and in order to automatically assign importance values and "keep track" of changes a new algorithm for Adaptive Assigning of Term Importance (AATI) is used. Keywords—hierarchy of concepts, ontology, ordered weighted aggregation, text identification
Balancing Sweatshop Ethics and Economics

At the close of the twentieth century, sweatshops remain an integral part of the world economic order. Most sweatshops are in developing countries where governments implicitly sanction them as an instrument of economic development. Multinational corporations and other advanced economy suppliers reduce operating costs by importing sweatshop products. Consumers who do not pay attention to supply sources buy sweatshop products that are priced lower than domestically produced goods. All sweatshops, by definition, have at least one highly questionable labor practice, such as paying workers extremely low wages, requiring long hours of work, operating with unhealthy and unsafe work environments, limiting worker rights, and employing child labor. As with exams, however, whether a questioned practice is found acceptable or unacceptable depends on the perspective of the grader. Certain sweatshop practices, such as slave labor, are considered fundamentally or culturally unacceptable by ethicists simply because the practice exists. For other practices ethicists look at the extent to which a practice deviates from universal or cultural norms in assessing acceptability. At some level, ethicists would find that practices are unacceptable because required work hours are too long, wage rates are too low, workplaces are too much of a threat to health and safety conditions, or employees are too young. For economists, or at least neoclassical economists, acceptability is assessed based on the economic result. Wages are not too low if more workers are employed; hours are not too long, work conditions are not too poor, and employees are not too young if low operating costs bring economic growth. Unless economic and ethical dimensions are completely orthogonal, there are workplace conditions that enable ethically minded corporations to operate economically with developing country sweatshops. But those practices can not be put in place and sustained unless the results are acceptable to governments, industries, and consumers. A government in a non-industrialized country might enact and enforce labor laws if the result does not significantly threaten its economy. Producers might abide by labor constraints if the result does not significantly raise the cost of production. Consumers might pay higher prices if they are assured that the worst labor practices have been eliminated. This paper considers the adverse nature of sweatshop practices, critically examines their economic and ethical implications, and assesses whether various ethical theories provide sufficient guidance for establishing labor practices that balance ethical concerns and economic consequences. An Integrated Social Contract Theory methodology is applied to identify a minimum set of hypernorms that could serve as a foundational base for balancing ethical and economic concerns. The paper concludes with recommendations on how businesses can ethically acquire developing country imports and how governments and consumers can reinforce those efforts.
Hepatic Protein Kinase-C and Protein Phosphatase Type-2A in the Fetal Rat

ABSTRACT: The Ca2+- and phospholipid-dependent protein kinase, protein kinase-C (PK-C), was studied in fetal rat liver between d 17 and 21 of gestation. Initial studies showed that rat liver, membrane-associated PK-C could be detected as a protein of Mr=80 000 using a polyclonal rat brain PK-C antiserum. Fetal hepatic membrane-bound PK-C activity rose as gestation progressed with adult levels (21 ± 3 pmol/min/mg protein) being attained by term. Although fasting for 48 h led to PK-C activation in adult livers, fetal hepatic PK-C was not activated by 48 h of maternal fasting. Membrane-associated protein phosphatase activity that might reverse PK-C action was also studied. PK-C sites in casein (an artificial PK-C substrate) were selectively dephosphorylated by a membrane-associated, poly-cation-stimulated protein phosphatase. This activity, thus classified as protein phosphatase type-2A, was constitutively expressed in fetal liver membranes from 17- 21 d gestation. We have previously reported that the other major hepatic protein phosphatase, protein phosphatase type-1, also is constitutively expressed during the later stage of gestation. Taken together with the results of our present study, our data indicate that PK-C-dependent phosphorylation in fetal liver probably increases with advancing gestation.
A Theory of Preferred Stock

Should preferred stock be treated under corporate law as an equity interest in the issuing corporation or under contract law as a senior security? Should a preferred certificate of designation subsumed in the corporate charter and treated as an incomplete contract filled out by fiduciary duty, or should it be treated as a complete contract with drafting burden on the party asserting the right, as would occur with a bond contract? Is preferred equity or debt? This article shows that preferred is both corporate and contractual, neither all one nor all the other. It sits on a fault line between two great private law paradigms, corporate and contract law, and draws on both. The overlap brings two competing grundnorms to bear when interests of preferred and common stockholders come into conflict in decided cases: on the one hand, managing to the common stock, as residual interest holder, maximizes value, while on the other hand, holding parties to contractual risk allocations maximizes value. When questions arise concerning the relative rights of preferred and common, the norms hold out conflicting answers. Delaware courts have taken the lead in confronting these questions, seeking to synchronize the law of preferred stock with the rest of corporate law, a project that leads to both innovation and stress.This article examines recent preferred cases to show two facets of Delaware law coming to bear as the synchronization process proceeds - first, reliance on independent directors for dispute resolution, and, second, the common stock value maximization norm. There follows a tilt toward corporate norms that disrupts risks allocated in heavily negotiated transactions, particularly in the venture capital sector. Toward the end of restoring balance between the corporate and contract paradigms, the article makes three recommendations. First, the meaning and scope of preferred contract rights should be determined by courts rather than by issuer boards of directors. Second, conflicts between preferred and common should not be decided by reference to a norm of common stock value maximization. Enterprise value should be the referent, more particularly, maximization of the value of the equity as a whole. Third, independent director determinations of conflicts between preferred and common should not be accorded ordinary business judgment review. Instead, a door should be left open for good faith review tailored to the context — a showing of bad faith treatment of the preferred where the integrity of a deal has been undermined, burden of proof on the board.
Transcriptional regulation of the sil locus by the SilCR signalling peptide and its implications on group A streptococcus virulence

In the last two decades an increasing number of local outbreaks of invasive group A streptococcus (GAS) infections including necrotizing fasciitis (NF) have been reported. We identified the streptococcal invasion locus (sil) which is essential for virulence of the M14 strain JS95 isolated from an NF patient. This locus contains six genes: silA/B and silD/E encoding two‐component system (TCS) and ABC transporter, respectively, homologous to the corresponding entities in the regulon of Streptococcus pneumoniae involved in genetic competence. Situated between these two units are silC and silCR, which highly overlap and are transcribed from the complementing strand at opposite directions. SilCR is a putative competence stimulating peptide, but in the M14 strain it has a start codon mutation. Deletion of silC or addition of synthetic SilCR attenuates virulence of the M14 strain. Here we found that silC and silCR form a novel regulatory circuit that controls the sil locus transcription. Under non‐inducing conditions silC represses the silCR promoter. Externally added SilCR peptide activates the TCS, which in turn stimulates silCR transcription. Ongoing silCR transcription mediates the repression of the converging and overlapping silC transcript. Transcription of bacteriocin‐like peptide (blp) operon mirrors the inverse relationships between the silC and silCR transcripts. It is upregulated by either addition of SilCR or deletion of silC. Moreover, expression of silC from a plasmid in a silC deleted‐mutant significantly represses blp transcription. Finally, we show that 18% of clinically relevant GAS isolates possess sil and produce SilCR. Based on these results we propose a working model for regulation gene expression and virulence in GAS by the SilCR signalling peptide.
Parallelizing Data Processing on FPGAs with Shifter Lists

Parallelism is currently seen as a mechanism to minimize the impact of the power and heat dissipation problems encountered in modern hardware. Data parallelism—based on partitioning the data—and pipeline parallelism—based on partitioning the computation—are the two main approaches to leverage parallelism on a wide range of hardware platforms. Unfortunately, not all data processing problems are susceptible to either of those strategies. An example is the skyline operator [Börzsönyi et al. 2001], which computes the set of Pareto-optimal points within a multidimensional dataset. Existing approaches to parallelize the skyline operator are based on data parallelism. As a result, they suffer from a high overhead when merging intermediate results because of the lack of a global view of the problem inherent to partitioning the input data. In this article, we show how to combine pipeline with data parallelism on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for a more efficient utilization of the available hardware parallelism. As we show in our experiments, skyline computation using our proposed technique scales linearly with the number of processing elements, and the performance we achieve on a rather small FPGA is comparable to that of a 64-core high-end server running a state-of-the-art data parallel implementation of skyline [Park et al. 2009]. The proposed approach to parallelize the skyline operator can be generalized to a wider range of data processing problems. We demonstrate this through a novel, highly parallel data structure, a shifter list, that can be efficiently implemented on an FPGA. The resulting template is easy to parametrize to implement a variety of computationally intensive operators such as frequent items, n-closest pairs, or K-means.
Differentiation of Bacillus anthracis and other Bacillus species by lectins

Bacillus anthracis was agglutinated by several lectins, including those from Griffonia simplicifolia, Glycine max, Abrus precatorius, and Ricinus communis. Some strains of Bacillus cereus var. mycoides (B. mycoides) were strongly reactive with the lectin from Helix pomatia and weakly reactive with the G. max lectin. The differential interactions between Bacillus species and lectins afforded a means of distinguishing B. anthracis from other bacilli. B. cereus strains exhibited heterogeneity with respect to agglutination patterns by lectins but could readily be differentiated from B. anthracis and the related B. mycoides. Spores of B. anthracis and B. mycoides retained lectin receptors, although the heating of spores or vegetative cells at 100 degrees C resulted in a decrease in their ability to be specifically agglutinated. Fluorescein-conjugated lectin of G. max stained vegetative cells of B. anthracis uniformly, suggesting that the distribution of lectin receptors was continuous over the entire cellular surface. B. anthracis cells grown under conditions to promote the production of capsular poly(D-glutamyl peptide) were also readily agglutinated by the lectins, suggesting that the lectin reactive sites penetrate the polypeptide layer. Trypsin, subtilisin, lysozyme, and mutanolysin did not modify the reactivity of B. anthracis with the G. max agglutinin, although the same enzymes markedly diminished the interaction between the lectin and B. mycoides. Because the lectins which interact with B. anthracis are specific for alpha-D-galactose or 2-acetamido-2-deoxy-alpha-D-galactose residues, it is likely that the bacteria possess cell surface polymers which contain these sugars. Lectins may prove useful in the laboratory identification of B. anthracis and possibly other pathogenic Bacillus species, such as B. cereus.
Preterm Birth and Cerebral Palsy: Is Tumor Necrosis Factor the Missing Link?

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Specialized Web Robot for Objectionable Web Content Classification

Abstract — This paper proposes a specialized Web robot to automatically collect objectionable Web contents for use in an objectionable Web content classification system, which creates the URL database of objectionable Web contents. It aims at shortening the update period of the DB, increasing the number of URLs in the DB, and enhancing the accuracy of the information in the DB. Keywords — Web robot, objectionable Web content classification, URL database, URL rating I. I NTRODUCTION NTERNET users are easily exposed to hate literature, pornography, pedophiles, and other inappropriate information. This is becoming serious social issue and parents are much concerned about the access to this kind of information by children. Now, we see many parents installing objectionable Web content filtering software in PC. Objectionable Web content filtering solution can be built on URL database method or dynamic method, or both. Most of the filtering solutions block connection to URLs which are in URL database. This is known to be more effective and efficient. But, the generation and maintenance of the URL database by human is difficult and slow. As the result, we need a system for the generation and maintenance of the URL database by automatically collecting and classifying Web content. The collection of Web content in the system is the role of Web robot. However, it is inappropriate to employ a general-purpose Web robot for objectionable Web content classification, because general-purpose Web crawling quickly loses its way and starts to gather harmless pages, even though it starts from the URLs of porn sites. As the gathering process goes to wrong direction, objectionable Web content classification takes longer and the URL database refreshes much less frequently, which mean it is not likely to filter out new objectionable Web contents. In addition, general-purpose Web robot does not feed any information to the classification module except the
Transformerless Inverter Topologies for Single-Phase Photovoltaic Systems: A Comparative Review

In photovoltaic (PV) applications, a transformer is often used to provide galvanic isolation and voltage ratio transformations between input and output. However, these conventional iron- and copper-based transformers increase the weight/size and cost of the inverter while reducing the efficiency and power density. It is therefore desirable to avoid using transformers in the inverter. However, additional care must be taken to avoid safety hazards such as ground fault currents and leakage currents, e.g., via the parasitic capacitor between the PV panel and ground. Consequently, the grid connected transformerless PV inverters must comply with strict safety standards such as IEEE 1547.1, VDE0126-1-1, EN 50106, IEC61727, and $\text{A}S/N$ ZS 5033. Various transformerless inverters have been proposed recently to eliminate the leakage current using different techniques such as decoupling the dc from the ac side and/or clamping the common mode (CM) voltage (CMV) during the freewheeling period, or using common ground configurations. The permutations and combinations of various decoupling techniques with integrated voltage buck–boost for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) allow numerous new topologies and configurations which are often confusing and difficult to follow when seeking to select the right topology. Therefore, to present a clear picture on the development of transformerless inverters for the next-generation grid-connected PV systems, this paper aims to comprehensively review and classify various transformerless inverters with detailed analytical comparisons. To reinforce the findings and comparisons as well as to give more insight on the CM characteristics and leakage current, computer simulations of major transformerless inverter topologies have been performed in PLECS software. Moreover, the cost and size are analyzed properly and summarized in a table. Finally, efficiency and thermal analysis are provided with a general summary as well as a technology roadmap.