bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Getting Out of the Left Lane: The Possibility of White Antiracist Pedagogy
Authors: Teel Karen
Published: January 2014

This article maintains that knowledge of the literature on multicultural education and social justice pedagogy is indispensable for white college professors who desire to teach effectively about racial justice concerns. In exploring this literature, I have noticed that many publications either articulate theory or reflect on concrete classroom strategies, while relatively few deploy theory to evaluate specific attempts at teaching for justice. This seems to me a gap worth filling. Speaking as a white, conventionally trained, Catholic theologian, I begin by explaining why I deem it appropriate to employ antiracist pedagogy. I then demonstrate that the literature on multicultural education and social justice pedagogy is essential to this effort by utilizing both types of literature, theoretical and practical, to analyze my own strategies and goals to date. Throughout, I discuss white antiracist theological pedagogy not as an accomplished fact, but as an emerging endeavor. See a companion essay in this issue of the journal (Anna Floerke Scheid and Elisabeth T. Vasko, “Teaching Race: Pedagogical Challenges in Predominantly White Undergraduate Theology Classrooms”), and responses by the authors of both essays, also published in this issue of the journal (“Responses: Toward an Antiracist Pedagogy”).
IMAGING DIAGNOSIS—SPINAL CORD HISTIOCYTIC SARCOMA IN A DOG
Authors: Taylor Amanda , Eichelberger Bunita , Hodo Carolyn , Cooper Jocelyn , Porter Brian
Published: January 2014

A 12‐year‐old mixed breed dog was presented for evaluation of progressive paraparesis and ataxia. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging was performed and identified multifocal intradural spinal cord mass lesions. The lesions were hyperintense in T2‐weighted sequences, isointense to mildly hyperintense in T1‐weighted sequences with strong contrast enhancement of the intradural lesions and spinal cord meninges. Spinal cord neoplasia was suspected. A diagnosis of intramedullary spinal cord histiocytic sarcoma, confined to the central nervous system, was confirmed histopathologically. Spinal cord histiocytic sarcoma is a rare neoplasm, but should be included in the differential diagnosis for dogs with clinical signs of myelopathy.
Multiple herbicide‐resistant Lolium rigidum (annual ryegrass) now dominates across the Western Australian grain belt
Authors: Owen M J , Martinez N J , Powles S B
Published: January 2014

Lolium rigidum (annual or rigid ryegrass) is a widespread annual weed in cropping systems of southern Australia, and herbicide resistance in L. rigidum is a common problem in this region. In 2010, a random survey was conducted across the grain belt of Western Australia to determine the frequency of herbicide‐resistant L. rigidum populations and to compare this with the results of previous surveys in 1998 and 2003. During the survey, 466 cropping fields were visited, with a total of 362 L. rigidum populations collected. Screening of these populations with the herbicides commonly used for control of L. rigidum revealed that resistance to the ACCase‐ and ALS‐inhibiting herbicides was common, with 96% of populations having plants resistant to the ACCase herbicide diclofop‐methyl and 98% having plants resistant to the ALS herbicide sulfometuron. Resistance to another ACCase herbicide, clethodim, is increasing, with 65% of populations now containing resistant plants. Resistance to other herbicide modes of action was significantly lower, with 27% of populations containing plants with resistance to the pre‐emergent herbicide trifluralin, and glyphosate, atrazine and paraquat providing good control of most of the populations screened in this survey. Ninety five per cent of L. rigidum populations contained plants with resistance to at least two herbicide modes of action. These results demonstrate that resistance levels have increased dramatically for the ACCase‐ and ALS‐inhibiting herbicides since the last survey in 2003 (>95% vs. 70–90%); therefore, the use of a wide range of integrated weed management options are required to sustain these cropping systems in the future.
The Mechanics of Traumatic Brain Injury: A Review of What We Know and What We Need to Know for Reducing Its Societal Burden
Authors: Meaney David F. , Morrison Barclay , Dale Bass Cameron
Published: January 2014

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant public health problem, on pace to become the third leading cause of death worldwide by 2020. Moreover, emerging evidence linking repeated mild traumatic brain injury to long-term neurodegenerative disorders points out that TBI can be both an acute disorder and a chronic disease. We are at an important transition point in our understanding of TBI, as past work has generated significant advances in better protecting us against some forms of moderate and severe TBI. However, we still lack a clear understanding of how to study milder forms of injury, such as concussion, or new forms of TBI that can occur from primary blast loading. In this review, we highlight the major advances made in understanding the biomechanical basis of TBI. We point out opportunities to generate significant new advances in our understanding of TBI biomechanics, especially as it appears across the molecular, cellular, and whole organ scale.
Exciton Liquid in Coupled Quantum Wells
Authors: Stern Michael , Umansky Vladimir , Bar-Joseph Israel
Published: January 2014

Exciton Liquid

Excitons, bound states of electrons and holes (states “vacated” by electrons), can be found in semiconductors and have long been predicted to form correlated phases at sufficiently large densities and low temperatures.

Stern
et al.

(p.
55
) studied the behavior of spatially indirect excitons, which consist of electrons and holes residing in spatially separated, but coupled, quantum wells. The excitons were created through a combination of photoexcitation and electric gating. At high enough laser power and low enough temperatures, a new phase with a distinct photoluminescence signature appeared with behavior consistent with that of a classical liquid of excitons.
Promoting Transparency in Social Science Research
Authors: Miguel E. , Camerer C. , Casey K. , Cohen J. , Esterling K. M. , Gerber A. , Glennerster R. , Green D. P. , Humphreys M. , Imbens G. , Laitin D. , Madon T. , Nelson L. , Nosek B. A. , Petersen M. , Sedlmayr R. , Simmons J. P. , Simonsohn U. , Van der Laan M.
Published: January 2014

Social scientists should adopt higher transparency standards to improve the quality and credibility of research.
Bounding Reasoning into Rules
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

by Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin

University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013. 267 pp. $35, £24.50. ISBN 9780226046631.
Authors: Morgan Mary S.
Published: January 2014

The authors explore how social scientists in Cold War United States recrafted reason to a simplified, rule-based technology for making choices in an uncertain world.
A Simpler Route for Making Nitrogen-Alkene Rings
Authors: Türkmen Yunus E. , Aggarwal Varinder K.
Published: January 2014

A common nitrogen building block used in many natural product and drug syntheses can now be made in its unprotected form in a single step.
An Exceptionally Bright Gamma-Ray Burst
Authors: Fynbo Johan P. U.
Published: January 2014

A detailed observation of a nearby gamma-ray burst should provide a clearer understanding in the process of the death of massive stars.
U.S. Tax Credit: Boondoggle or Boon for Research?
Authors: Malakoff David
Published: January 2014

Congress has once again allowed a popular tax break that encourages U.S. companies to invest in research to expire.
EPA Science Report Signals Start of Wetlands Battle
Authors: Stokstad Erik
Published: January 2014

Environmentalists and industry groups are lining up to fight over a draft rule that would protect isolated wetlands and other waters.
Global Research Network Raises $1 Billion for Its Centers
Authors: Stokstad Erik
Published: January 2014

An international network of agricultural research centers has achieved the ambitious goal of doubling its budget in 5 years, to $1 billion.
Life and Death at Stonehenge
Authors: Balter Michael
Published: January 2014

Studies offer new insight into the great monument's ritual purpose and meaning.
Riot control agents: the tear gases CN, CS and OC—a medical review
Authors: Schep Leo J , Slaughter R J , McBride D I
Published: January 2014

Introduction

2-Chloroacetophenone (CN),o-chlorobenzylidene malonitrile (CS) and oleoresin capsicum (OC) are common riot control agents. While serious systemic effects are uncommon, exposure to high concentrations may lead to severe complications and even death. The aim of this narrative review is to summarise all main aspects of the riot control agents CN, CS and OC toxicology, including mechanisms of toxicity, clinical features and management.

Methods

OVID MEDLINE and ISI Web of Science were searched for terms associated with CN, CS and OC toxicity in humans and those describing the mechanism of action, clinical features and treatment protocols.

Results

CN, CS and OC are effective lacrimating agents; evidence for toxicity, as measured by the threshold for irritation, is greatest for CN, followed by CS and OC. Typically, ocular and respiratory tract irritation occurs within 20–60 s of exposure. Ocular effects involve blepharospasm, photophobia, conjunctivitis and periorbital oedema. Following inhalation, effects may include a stinging or burning sensation in the nose, tight chest, sore throat, coughing, dyspnoea and difficulty breathing. Dermal outcomes are variable, more severe for CN and include dermal irritation, bulla formation and subcutaneous oedema. Removal from the contaminated area and fresh air is a priority. There is no antidote; treatment consists of thorough decontamination and symptom-directed supportive care. Ocular exposure requires thorough eye decontamination, an eye exam and appropriate pain management. Monitoring and support of respiratory function is important in patients with significant respiratory symptoms. Standard treatment protocols may be required with patients with pre-existing respiratory conditions. Dermal exposures may require systemic steroids for patients who develop delayed contact dermatitis.

Conclusions

CN, CS and OC are effective riot control agents. In the majority of exposures, significant clinical effects are not anticipated. The irritant effects can be minimised both by rapid evacuation from sites of exposure, decontamination and appropriate supportive care.
Tuzo Wilson and the acceptance of pre-Mesozoic continental drift
Authors: Hoffman Paul F.
Published: January 2014

Tuzo Wilson’s well-known pre-1961 opposition to continental drift stemmed from his early experience as a geologist in the Appalachians and the Canadian Shield, which convinced him that orogenesis did not change drastically over geologic time. Conversely, Taylor (in 1910) and Wegener (in 1912) hypothesized that continental drift began in Cenozoic or Mesozoic time. Between 1949 and 1960, Tuzo Wilson with Adrian Scheidegger developed a quasi-uniformitarian model of progressive continental accretion around fixed Archean nuclei. Tuzo abruptly jettisoned this model in 1961 when, under pressure from paleomagnetic evidence for continental drift and a nascent concept of sea-floor spreading, he finally entertained the possibility of pre-Mesozoic as well as younger continental drift. He immediately found it a superior fit to Appalachian and Shield geology, while his uniformitarian conviction remained intact. Tuzo had blinded himself to the evidence for continental drift so long as he confined it to Taylor or Wegener’s conception. In continental drift operating continuously over geologic time, he found a theory he could eagerly accept.
RECURRENCE IN RESONANT TRANSMISSION OF ONE-DIMENSIONAL ARRAY OF DELTA POTENTIALS
Authors: CORDOURIER-MARURI GUILLERMO , GUPTA VIRENDRA , DE COSS ROMEO
Published: January 2014

In this paper, the resonant transmission of a moving particle which interacts with a one-dimensional array of N δ-function potentials is investigated. A suitable transfer matrix formulation is used to obtain the particle transmission. We give the parameters for perfect tunneling and the transcendental equation for the quasi-bound state energies for N = 2, 3 and 4. Conditions for perfect tunneling and resonant transmission are discussed for arrays with arbitrary N. A model to explain how the tunneling energy filter works in these systems is proposed here.
A Push-Based Agent Communication Model Empowering Assistive Technologies
Authors: Järvinen Hannu , Garcia-Gasulla Dario , Cortés Ulises
Published: January 2014

Nowadays Web services are one of the most commonly used technologies for distributed system integration and interoperability. Recently, a new communication technique called WebSockets has appeared for implementing Web services that offer a true server-push mechanism. In this paper we present a system based on it to manage agent communications, and we motivate its use in an Assistive Technologies use case. A new WebSocket Message Transport Protocol is described and an implementation for the Jade platform is presented. Subscription based agent interaction for the use case is presented, along with a comparison between WebSocket and HTTP Message Transport Protocols.
Fine-grained parallelism accelerating for RNA secondary structure prediction with pseudoknots based on FPGA
Authors: Xia Fei , Jin Guoqing
Published: January 2014

PKNOTS is a most famous benchmark program and has been widely used to predict RNA secondary structure including pseudoknots. It adopts the standard four-dimensional (4D) dynamic programming (DP) method and is the basis of many variants and improved algorithms. Unfortunately, the O(N6) computing requirements and complicated data dependency greatly limits the usefulness of PKNOTS package with the explosion in gene database size. In this paper, we present a fine-grained parallel PKNOTS package and prototype system for accelerating RNA folding application based on FPGA chip. We adopted a series of storage optimization strategies to resolve the "Memory Wall" problem. We aggressively exploit parallel computing strategies to improve computational efficiency. We also propose several methods that collectively reduce the storage requirements for FPGA on-chip memory. To the best of our knowledge, our design is the first FPGA implementation for accelerating 4D DP problem for RNA folding application including pseudoknots. The experimental results show a factor of more than 50x average speedup over the PKNOTS-1.08 software running on a PC platform with Intel Core2 Q9400 Quad CPU for input RNA sequences. However, the power consumption of our FPGA accelerator is only about 50% of the general-purpose micro-processors.
OVERVIEW OF TRANSVERSE MOMENTUM DEPENDENT FACTORIZATION BREAKING
Authors: ROGERS TED C.
Published: January 2014

We provide an overview of recent investigations into hard processes where the factorization into transverse momentum dependent parton correlation functions breaks down.
EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF SINGLE SPIN ASYMMETRIES AND TMDs
Authors: CHEN JIAN-PING
Published: January 2014

Single Spin Asymmetries and Transverse Momentum Dependent (TMD) distribution study has been one of the main focuses of hadron physics in recent years. The initial exploratory Semi-Inclusive Deep-Inelastic-Scattering (SIDIS) experiments with transversely polarized proton and deuteron targets from HERMES and COMPASS attracted great attention and lead to very active efforts in both experiments and theory. A SIDIS experiment on the neutron with a polarized 3 He target was performed at JLab. Recently published results as well as new preliminary results are shown. Precision TMD experiments are planned at JLab after the 12 GeV energy upgrade. Three approved experiments with a new SoLID spectrometer on both the proton and neutron will provide high precision TMD data in the valence quark region. In the long-term future, an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) as proposed in US (MEIC@JLab and E-RHIC@BNL) will provide precision TMD data of the gluons and the sea. A new opportunity just emerged in China that a low-energy EIC (1st stage EIC@HIAF) may provide precision TMD data in the sea quark region, complementary to the proposed EIC in US.
SOLUTION OF THE NEXT-TO-LEADING ORDER BFKL EQUATION
Authors: CHIRILLI GIOVANNI ANTONIO
Published: January 2014

The solution of the next-to-leading order BFKL equation is obtained by constructing the eigenfunctions as a perturbative expansion of the conforma leading order conformal eigenfunctions.
THE PROTON SPIN DECOMPOSITION: PATH DEPENDENCE AND GAUGE SYMMETRY
Authors: LORCÉ CÉDRIC
Published: January 2014

We discuss the different types of decomposition of the proton spin. We stress that, despite their lack of uniqueness, the Chen et al. and Wakamatsu decompositions are perfectly measurable. We argue that a large part of the recent controversies boils down to the fact that there actually exist two types of gauge transformations in the Chen et al. approach, where physical and gauge degrees of freedom of the gauge potential are explicitly separated. By carefully distinguishing these two types of gauge transformations, one can easily understand how the concepts of gauge invariance, Stueckelberg symmetry, path dependence and measurability are linked to each other.
OBSERVATIONS OF CHIRAL ODD GPDs AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
Authors: GOLDSTEIN GARY R. , LIUTI SIMONETTA , GONZALEZ-HERNANDEZ J. OSVALDO
Published: January 2014

Our original suggestion to investigate exclusive π0 electroproduction as a method for extracting the tensor charge, transversity, and other quantities related to chiral odd generalized parton distributions from cross section and asymmetry data is reviewed. We explain some of the details of the process: i) the connection between the helicity description and the cartesian basis; ii) the dependence on the momentum transfer squared, Q2, and iii) the angular momentum, parity, and charge conjugation constraints (JPC quantum numbers).
FRAGMENTATION FUNCTIONS AT BABAR
Authors:   on behalf of the BaBar Collaboration, GARZIA ISABELLA
Published: January 2014

Inclusive hadron production cross section in e+e- annihilation shed light on fundamental questions of hadronization and fragmentation processes. We present measurements of inclusive spectra of charged pions, kaons, and protons (antiprotons) produced in e+e- collisions at the center-of-mass energy of 10.54 GeV, and tests of QCD predictions and hadronization models. We also report the results on the measurement of the azimuthal modulation induced by the Collins effect in inclusive production of charged pion pairs e+e- → ππX, where the two pions are produced in opposite hemispheres. These data allows the determination of the polarized Collins fragmentation functions.
JLAB12 AND THE STRUCTURE OF HADRONS
Authors: CONTALBRIGO M.
Published: January 2014

The investigation of the partonic degrees of freedom beyond collinear approximation (3D description) has been gained increasing interest in the last decade. The Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory, after the CEBAF upgrade to 12 GeV, will become the most complete facility for the investigation of the hadron structure in the valence region by scattering of polarized electron off various polarized nucleon targets. A compendium of the planned experiments is here presented.
Annotation propagation in image databases using similarity graphs
Authors: Houle Michael E. , Oria Vincent , Satoh Shin'ichi , Sun Jichao
Published: January 2014

The practicality of large-scale image indexing and querying methods depends crucially upon the availability of semantic information. The manual tagging of images with semantic information is in general very labor intensive, and existing methods for automated image annotation may not always yield accurate results. The aim of this paper is to reduce to a minimum the amount of human intervention required in the semantic annotation of images, while preserving a high degree of accuracy. Ideally, only one copy of each object of interest would be labeled manually, and the labels would then be propagated automatically to all other occurrences of the objects in the database. To this end, we propose an influence propagation strategy,
SW-KProp
, that requires no human intervention beyond the initial labeling of a subset of the images.
SW-KProp
distributes semantic information within a similarity graph defined on all images in the database: each image iteratively transmits its current label information to its neighbors, and then readjusts its own label according to the combined influences of its neighbors.
SW-KProp
influence propagation can be efficiently performed by means of matrix computations, provided that pairwise similarities of images are available. We also propose a variant of
SW-KProp
which enhances the quality of the similarity graph by selecting a reduced feature set for each prelabeled image and rebuilding its neighborhood. The performances of the
SW-KProp
method and its variant were evaluated against several competing methods on classification tasks for three image datasets: a handwritten digit dataset, a face dataset and a web image dataset. For the digit images,
SW-KProp
and its variant performed consistently better than the other methods tested. For the face and web images,
SW-KProp
outperformed its competitors for the case when the number of prelabeled images was relatively small. The performance was seen to improve significantly when the feature selection strategy was applied.
Enhancing news organization for convenient retrieval and browsing
Authors: Li Zechao , Liu Jing , Wang Meng , Xu Changsheng , Lu Hanqing
Published: January 2014

To facilitate users to access news quickly and comprehensively, we design a news search and browsing system named GeoVisNews, in which the news elements of “Where”, “Who”, “What” and “When” are enhanced via news geo-localization, image enrichment and joint ranking, respectively. For news geo-localization, an Ordinal Correlation Consistent Matrix Factorization (OCCMF) model is proposed to maintain the relevance rankings of locations to a specific news document and simultaneously capture intra-relations among locations and documents. To visualize news, we develop a novel method to enrich news documents with appropriate web images. Specifically, multiple queries are first generated from news documents for image search, and then the appropriate images are selected from the collected web images by an intelligent fusion approach based on multiple features. Obtaining the geo-localized and image enriched news resources, we further employ a joint ranking strategy to provide relevant, timely and popular news items as the answer of user searching queries. Extensive experiments on a large-scale news dataset collected from the web demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approaches over related methods.
Reachability analysis of program variables
Authors: Nikolić Đurica , Spoto Fausto
Published: January 2014

Reachability from a program variable
v
to a program variable
w
states that from
v
, it is possible to follow a path of memory locations that leads to the object bound to
w
. We present a new abstract domain for the static analysis of possible reachability between program variables or, equivalently, definite unreachability between them. This information is important for improving the precision of other static analyses, such as side-effects, field initialization, cyclicity and path-length analysis, as well as more complex analyses built upon them, such as nullness and termination analysis. We define and prove correct our reachability analysis for Java bytecode, defined as a constraint-based analysis, where the constraint is a graph whose nodes are the program points and whose arcs propagate reachability information in accordance to the abstract semantics of each bytecode instruction. For each program point
p
, our reachability analysis produces an overapproximation of the ordered pairs of variables 〈
v
,
w
〉 such that
v
might reach
w
at
p
. Seen the other way around, if a pair 〈
v
,
w
〉 is not present in the overapproximation at
p
, then
v
definitely does not reach
w
at
p
. We have implemented the analysis inside the Julia static analyzer. Our experiments of analysis of nontrivial Java and Android programs show the improvement of precision due to the presence of reachability information. Moreover, reachability analysis actually reduces the overall cost of nullness and termination analysis.
Analyzing user behavior across social sharing environments
Authors: Meo Pasquale de , Ferrara Emilio , Abel Fabian , Aroyo Lora , Houben Geert-Jan
Published: January 2014

In this work we present an in-depth analysis of the user behaviors on different Social Sharing systems. We consider three popular platforms, Flickr, Delicious and StumbleUpon, and, by combining techniques from social network analysis with techniques from semantic analysis, we characterize the tagging behavior as well as the tendency to create friendship relationships of the users of these platforms. The aim of our investigation is to see if (and how) the features and goals of a given Social Sharing system reflect on the behavior of its users and, moreover, if there exists a correlation between the social and tagging behavior of the users. We report our findings in terms of the characteristics of user profiles according to three different dimensions: (i) intensity of user activities, (ii) tag-based characteristics of user profiles, and (iii) semantic characteristics of user profiles.
Walking pace affected by interactive sounds simulating stepping on different terrains
Authors: Turchet Luca , Serafin Stefania , Cesari Paola
Published: January 2014

This article investigates whether auditory feedback affects natural locomotion patterns. Individuals were provided with footstep sounds simulating different surface materials. The sounds were interactively generated using shoes with pressure sensors. Results showed that subjects' walking speed changed as a function of the type of simulated ground material. This effect may arise due to the presence of conflicting information between the auditory and foot-haptic modality, or because of an adjustment of locomotion to the physical properties evoked by the sounds simulating the ground materials. The results reported in this study suggest that auditory feedback may be more important in the regulation of walking in natural environments than has been acknowledged. Furthermore, auditory feedback could be used to develop novel approaches to the design of therapeutic and rehabilitation procedures for locomotion.
Intuitiveness of vibrotactile speed regulation cues
Authors: Lylykangas Jani , Surakka Veikko , Rantala Jussi , Raisamo Roope
Published: January 2014

Interpretations of vibrotactile stimulations were compared between two participant groups. In both groups, the task was to evaluate specifically designed tactile stimulations presented to the wrist or chest. Ascending, constant, and descending vibration frequency profiles of the stimuli represented information for three different speed regulation instructions: “accelerate your speed,” “keep your speed constant,” and “decelerate your speed,” respectively. The participants were treated differently so that one of the groups was first taught (i.e., primed) the meanings of the stimuli, whereas the other group was not taught (i.e., unprimed). The results showed that the stimuli were evaluated nearly equally in the primed and the unprimed groups. The best performing stimuli communicated the three intended meanings in the rate of 88% to 100% in the primed group and in the unprimed group in the rate of 71% to 83%. Both groups performed equally in evaluating “keep your speed constant” and “decelerate your speed” information. As the unprimed participants performed similarly to the primed participants, the results suggest that vibrotactile stimulation can be intuitively understood. The results suggest further that carefully designed vibrotactile stimulations could be functional in delivering easy-to-understand feedback on how to regulate the speed of movement, such as in physical exercise and rehabilitation applications.
Virtual travel collisions
Authors: Blom Kristopher J. , Beckhaus Steffi
Published: January 2014

Travel methods are the most basic and widespread interaction method with virtual environments. They are the primary and often the only way the user interactively experiences the environment. We present a study composed of three experiments that investigates how virtual collisions methods and feedback impact user perception of the realism of collisions and the virtual environment. A wand-based virtual travel method was used to navigate maze environments in an immersive projective system. The results indicated that the introduction of collision handling significantly improved the user's perception of the realism of the environment and collisions. An effect of feedback on the perceived level of realism of collisions and solidity of the environment was also found. Our results indicate that feedback should be context appropriate, e.g. fitting to a collision with the object; yet, the modality and richness of feedback were only important in that traditional color change feedback did not perform as well as audio or haptic feedback. In combination, the experiments indicated that in immersive virtual environments the stop collision handling method produced a more realistic impression than the slide method that is popular in games. In total, the study suggests that feedback fitting the collision context, coupled with the stop handling method, provides the best perceived realism of collisions and scene.
2D Linear oculomotor plant mathematical model
Authors: Komogortsev Oleg , Holland Corey , Jayarathna Sampath , Karpov Alex
Published: January 2014

This article assesses the ability of a two-dimensional (2D) linear homeomorphic oculomotor plant mathematical model to simulate normal human saccades on a 2D plane. The proposed model is driven by a simplified pulse-step neuronal control signal and makes use of linear simplifications to account for the unique characteristics of the eye globe and the extraocular muscles responsible for horizontal and vertical eye movement. The linear nature of the model sacrifices some anatomical accuracy for computational speed and analytic tractability, and may be implemented as two one-dimensional models for parallel signal simulation. Practical applications of the model might include improved noise reduction and signal recovery facilities for eye tracking systems, additional metrics from which to determine user effort during usability testing, and enhanced security in biometric identification systems. The results indicate that the model is capable of produce oblique saccades with properties resembling those of normal human saccades and is capable of deriving muscle constants that are viable as biometric indicators. Therefore, we conclude that sacrifice in the anatomical accuracy of the model produces negligible effects on the accuracy of saccadic simulation on a 2D plane and may provide a usable model for applications in computer science, human-computer interaction, and related fields.
Binary Opinion Dynamics with Stubborn Agents
Authors: Yildiz Ercan , Ozdaglar Asuman , Acemoglu Daron , Saberi Amin , Scaglione Anna
Published: January 2014

We study binary opinion dynamics in a social network with
stubborn agents
who influence others but do not change their opinions. We focus on a generalization of the classical voter model by introducing nodes (stubborn agents) that have a fixed state. We show that the presence of stubborn agents with opposing opinions precludes convergence to consensus; instead, opinions converge in distribution with disagreement and fluctuations. In addition to the first moment of this distribution typically studied in the literature, we study the behavior of the second moment in terms of network properties and the opinions and locations of stubborn agents. We also study the problem of optimal placement of stubborn agents where the location of a fixed number of stubborn agents is chosen to have the maximum impact on the long-run expected opinions of agents.
Exploring single and multilevel JIT compilation policy for modern machines
1
Authors: Jantz Michael R. , Kulkarni Prasad A.
Published: January 2014

Dynamic or Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation is essential to achieve high-performance emulation for programs written in
managed
languages, such as Java and C#. It has been observed that a conservative JIT compilation policy is most effective to obtain good runtime performance without impeding application progress on single-core machines. At the same time, it is often suggested that a more aggressive dynamic compilation strategy may perform best on modern machines that provide abundant computing resources, especially with virtual machines (VMs) that are also capable of spawning multiple concurrent compiler threads. However, comprehensive research on the best JIT compilation policy for such modern processors and VMs is currently lacking. The goal of this work is to explore the properties of single-tier and multitier JIT compilation policies that can enable existing and future VMs to realize the best program performance on modern machines.

In this work, we design novel experiments and implement new VM configurations to effectively control the compiler aggressiveness and optimization levels (
if
and
when
methods are compiled) in the industry-standard Oracle HotSpot Java VM to achieve this goal. We find that the best JIT compilation policy is determined by the nature of the application and the speed and effectiveness of the dynamic compilers. We extend earlier results showing the suitability of conservative JIT compilation on single-core machines for VMs with multiple concurrent compiler threads. We show that employing the free compilation resources (compiler threads and hardware cores) to aggressively compile
more
program methods quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. At the same time, we also find that using the free resources to reduce compiler queue backup (compile selected hot methods
early
) significantly benefits program performance, especially for slower (highly optimizing) JIT compilers. For such compilers, we observe that accurately prioritizing JIT method compiles is crucial to realize the most performance benefit with the smallest hardware budget. Finally, we show that a tiered compilation policy, although complex to implement, greatly alleviates the impact of more and early JIT compilation of programs on modern machines.
An efficient multicharacter transition string-matching engine based on the aho-corasick algorithm
Authors: Chen Chien-Chi , Wang Sheng-De
Published: January 2014

A string-matching engine capable of inspecting multiple characters in parallel can multiply the throughput. However, the space required for implementing a matching engine that can process multiple characters in parallel generally grows exponentially with respect to the characters to be processed in parallel. Based on the Aho-Corasick algorithm (AC-algorithm), this work presents a novel multicharacter transition Nondeterministic Finite Automaton (NFA) approach, called
multicharacter AC-NFA
, to allow for the inspection of multiple characters in parallel. This approach first converts an AC-trie to an AC-NFA by allowing for the simultaneous activation of multiple states and then converts the AC-NFA to a
k
-character AC-NFA by an algorithm with concatenation operations and assistant transitions. Additionally, the alignment problem, which occurs while multiple characters are being inspected in parallel, is solved using assistant transitions. Moreover, a corresponding output is provided for each inspected character by introducing priority multiplexers to determine the final matching outputs during implementation of the multicharacter AC-NFA. Consequently, the number of derived
k
-character transitions grows linearly with respect to the number
k
. Furthermore, the derived multicharacter AC-NFA is implemented on FPGAs for evaluation. The resulting throughput grows approximately 14 times and the hardware cost grows about 18 times for 16-character AC-NFA implementation, as compared with that for 1-character AC-NFA implementation. The achievable throughput is 21.4Gbps for the 16-character AC-NFA implementation operating at a 167.36MHz clock.
The design and implementation of heterogeneous multicore systems for energy-efficient speculative thread execution
Authors: Luo Yangchun , Hsu Wei-Chung , Zhai Antonia
Published: January 2014

With the emergence of multicore processors, various aggressive execution models have been proposed to exploit fine-grained thread-level parallelism, taking advantage of the fast on-chip interconnection communication. However, the aggressive nature of these execution models often leads to excessive energy consumption incommensurate to execution time reduction. In the context of Thread-Level Speculation, we demonstrated that on a same-ISA heterogeneous multicore system, by dynamically deciding how on-chip resources are utilized, speculative threads can achieve performance gain in an energy-efficient way.

Through a systematic design space exploration, we built a multicore architecture that integrates heterogeneous components of processing cores and first-level caches. To cope with processor reconfiguration overheads, we introduced runtime mechanisms to mitigate their impacts. To match program execution with the most energy-efficient processor configuration, the system was equipped with a dynamic resource allocation scheme that characterizes program behaviors using novel processor counters.

We evaluated the proposed heterogeneous system with a diverse set of benchmark programs from SPEC CPU2000 and CPU20006 suites. Compared to the most efficient homogeneous TLS implementation, we achieved similar performance but consumed 18% less energy. Compared to the most efficient homogeneous uniprocessor running sequential programs, we improved performance by 29% and reduced energy consumption by 3.6%, which is a 42% improvement in energy-delay-squared product.
Dynamic microarchitectural adaptation using machine learning
Authors: Dubach Christophe , Jones Timothy M. , Bonilla Edwin V.
Published: January 2014

Adaptive microarchitectures are a promising solution for designing high-performance, power-efficient microprocessors. They offer the ability to tailor computational resources to the specific requirements of different programs or program phases. They have the potential to adapt the hardware cost-effectively at runtime to any application’s needs. However, one of the key challenges is how to dynamically determine the best architecture configuration at any given time, for any new workload.

This article proposes a novel control mechanism based on a predictive model for microarchitectural adaptivity control. This model is able to efficiently control adaptivity by monitoring the behaviour of an application’s different phases at runtime. We show that by using this model on SPEC 2000, we double the energy/performance efficiency of the processor when compared to the best static configuration tuned for the whole benchmark suite. This represents 74% of the improvement available if we know the best microarchitecture for each program phase ahead of time. In addition, we present an extended analysis of the best configurations found and show that the overheads associated with the implementation of our scheme have a negligible impact on performance and power.
E
3
CC: A memory error protection scheme with novel address mapping for subranked and low-power memories
Authors: Chen Long , Cao Yanan , Zhang Zhao
Published: January 2014

This study presents and evaluates E
3
CC (Enhanced Embedded ECC), a full design and implementation of a generic embedded ECC scheme that enables power-efficient error protection for subranked memory systems. It incorporates a novel address mapping scheme called Biased Chinese Remainder Mapping (BCRM) to resolve the address mapping issue for memories of page interleaving, plus a simple and effective cache design to reduce extra ECC traffic. Our evaluation using SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks confirms the performance and power efficiency of the E
3
CC scheme for subranked memories as well as conventional memories.
Toward software-defined SLAs
Authors: Lango Jason
Published: January 2014

Enterprise computing in the public cloud.
Mining geographic-temporal-semantic patterns in trajectories for location prediction
Authors: Ying Josh Jia-Ching , Lee Wang-Chien , Tseng Vincent S.
Published: January 2014

In recent years, research on location predictions by mining trajectories of users has attracted a lot of attention. Existing studies on this topic mostly treat such predictions as just a type of location recommendation, that is, they predict the next location of a user using location recommenders. However, an user usually visits somewhere for reasons other than interestingness. In this article, we propose a novel mining-based location prediction approach called
Geographic-Temporal-Semantic-based Location Prediction (GTS-LP),
which takes into account a user's geographic-triggered intentions, temporal-triggered intentions, and semantic-triggered intentions, to estimate the probability of the user in visiting a location. The core idea underlying our proposal is the discovery of trajectory patterns of users, namely
GTS patterns
, to capture frequent movements triggered by the three kinds of intentions. To achieve this goal, we define a new trajectory pattern to capture the key properties of the behaviors that are motivated by the three kinds of intentions from trajectories of users. In our
GTS-LP
approach, we propose a series of novel matching strategies to calculate the similarity between the current movement of a user and discovered GTS patterns based on various moving intentions. On the basis of similitude, we make an online prediction as to the location the user intends to visit. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on location prediction based on trajectory pattern mining that explores the geographic, temporal, and semantic properties simultaneously. By means of a comprehensive evaluation using various real trajectory datasets, we show that our proposed
GTS-LP
approach delivers excellent performance and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art location prediction methods.
Dynamic joint sentiment-topic model
Authors: He Yulan , Lin Chenghua , Gao Wei , Wong Kam-Fai
Published: January 2014

Social media data are produced continuously by a large and uncontrolled number of users. The dynamic nature of such data requires the sentiment and topic analysis model to be also dynamically updated, capturing the most recent language use of sentiments and topics in text. We propose a dynamic Joint Sentiment-Topic model (dJST) which allows the detection and tracking of views of current and recurrent interests and shifts in topic and sentiment. Both topic and sentiment dynamics are captured by assuming that the current sentiment-topic-specific word distributions are generated according to the word distributions at previous epochs. We study three different ways of accounting for such dependency information: (1)
sliding window
where the current sentiment-topic word distributions are dependent on the previous sentiment-topic-specific word distributions in the last
S
epochs; (2)
skip model
where history sentiment topic word distributions are considered by skipping some epochs in between; and (3)
multiscale model
where previous long- and short- timescale distributions are taken into consideration. We derive efficient online inference procedures to sequentially update the model with newly arrived data and show the effectiveness of our proposed model on the Mozilla add-on reviews crawled between 2007 and 2011.
Personalized emerging topic detection based on a term aging model
Authors: Cataldi Mario , Caro Luigi Di , Schifanella Claudio
Published: January 2014

Twitter is a popular microblogging service that acts as a ground-level information news flashes portal where people with different background, age, and social condition provide information about what is happening in front of their eyes. This characteristic makes Twitter probably the fastest information service in the world. In this article, we recognize this role of Twitter and propose a novel, user-aware topic detection technique that permits to retrieve, in real time, the most emerging topics of discussion expressed by the community within the interests of specific users. First, we analyze the topology of Twitter looking at how the information spreads over the network, taking into account the authority/influence of each active user. Then, we make use of a novel term aging model to compute the burstiness of each term, and provide a graph-based method to retrieve the minimal set of terms that can represent the corresponding topic. Finally, since any user can have topic preferences inferable from the shared content, we leverage such knowledge to highlight the most emerging topics within her foci of interest. As evaluation we then provide several experiments together with a user study proving the validity and reliability of the proposed approach.
Relational term-suggestion graphs incorporating multipartite concept and expertise networks
Authors: Shieh Jyh-Ren , Lin Ching-Yung , Wang Shun-Xuan , Wu Ja-Ling
Published: January 2014

Term suggestions recommend query terms to a user based on his initial query. Suggesting adequate terms is a challenging issue. Most existing commercial search engines suggest search terms based on the frequency of prior used terms that match the leading alphabets the user types. In this article, we present a novel mechanism to construct semantic term-relation graphs to suggest relevant search terms in the semantic level. We built term-relation graphs based on multipartite networks of existing social media, especially from Wikipedia. The multipartite linkage networks of contributor-term, term-category, and term-term are extracted from Wikipedia to eventually form term relation graphs. For fusing these multipartite linkage networks, we propose to incorporate the contributor-category networks to model the expertise of the contributors. Based on our experiments, this step has demonstrated clear enhancement on the accuracy of the inferred relatedness of the term-semantic graphs. Experiments on keyword-expanded search based on 200 TREC-5 ad-hoc topics showed obvious advantage of our algorithms over existing approaches.
A survey of music similarity and recommendation from music context data
Authors: Knees Peter , Schedl Markus
Published: January 2014

In this survey article, we give an overview of methods for music similarity estimation and music recommendation based on music context data. Unlike approaches that rely on
music content
and have been researched for almost two decades,
music-context
-based (or
contextual
) approaches to music retrieval are a quite recent field of research within music information retrieval (MIR).
Contextual data
refers to all music-relevant information that is not included in the audio signal itself. In this article, we focus on contextual aspects of music primarily accessible through web technology. We discuss different sources of context-based data for individual music pieces and for music artists. We summarize various approaches for constructing similarity measures based on the collaborative or cultural knowledge incorporated into these data sources. In particular, we identify and review three main types of context-based similarity approaches:
text-retrieval-based approaches
(relying on web-texts, tags, or lyrics),
co-occurrence-based approaches
(relying on playlists, page counts, microblogs, or peer-to-peer-networks), and approaches based on
user ratings
or listening habits. This article elaborates the characteristics of the presented context-based measures and discusses their strengths as well as their weaknesses.