High speed wide fan‐in designs using clock controlled dual keeper domino logic circuits

Clock Controlled Dual keeper Domino logic structures (CCDD_1 and CCDD_2) for achieving a high‐speed performance with low power consumption and a good noise margin are proposed in this paper. The keeper control circuit comprises an additional PMOS keeper transistor controlled by the clock and foot node voltage. This control mechanism offers abrupt conditional control of the keeper circuit and reduces the contention current, leading to high‐speed performance. The keeper transistor arrangement also reduces the loop gain associated with the feedback circuitry. Hence, the circuits offer less delay variability. The design and simulation of various wide fan‐in designs using 180 nm CMOS technology validates the proposed CCDD_1 and CCDD_2 designs, offering an increased speed performance of 7.2% and 8.5%, respectively, over a conventional domino logic structure. The noise gain margin analysis proves good robustness of the CCDD structures when compared with a conventional domino logic circuit configuration. A Monte Carlo simulation for 2,000 runs under statistical process variations demonstrates that the proposed CCDD circuits offer a significantly reduced delay variability factor.     

Minimalist Antibodies and Mimetics: An Update and Recent Applications

The immune system utilizes antibodies to recognize foreign or disease‐relevant receptors, initiating an immune response to destroy unwelcomed guests. Because researchers can evolve antibodies to bind virtually any target, it is perhaps unsurprising that these reagents, and their small‐molecule conjugates, are used extensively in clinical and basic research environments. However, virtues of antibodies are countered by significant challenges. Foremost among these is the need for expression in mammalian cells (largely due to often necessary post‐translational modifications). In response to these challenges, researchers have developed an array of minimalist antibodies and mimetics, which are smaller, more stable, simpler to express in Escherichia coli, and amendable to laboratory evolution and protein engineering. Here we describe these scaffolds and discuss recent applications of minimalist antibodies and mimetics.     

Effects of maternal negativity and of early and recent recurrent depressive disorder on children's false belief understanding.

Research has shown that children of depressed mothers are at risk for problems in a variety of developmental domains; however, little is known about the effects of maternal depression on children's emerging understanding of false beliefs. In this study, 3 false belief tasks were administered to 5-year-old children whose mothers had either met criteria for major depressive disorder within the first 20 months of the child's life (n = 91) or had never been depressed (n = 50). Significant difficulties in performance were found among the children of depressed mothers, especially those whose mothers had experienced early and recent recurrent depressive disorder. Regardless of diagnostic status, children whose mothers exhibited negativity during problem-solving tasks administered at an earlier developmental period also were less likely to demonstrate false belief understanding. These effects remained even after child verbal ability was controlled. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fast estimation of fractal dimension and correlation integral on stream data

In this paper we give a very space-efficient, yet fast method for estimating the fractal dimensionality of the points in a data stream. Algorithms to estimate the fractal dimension exist, such as the straightforward quadratic algorithm and the faster O(NlogN) or even O(N) box-counting algorithms. However, the sub-quadratic algorithms require Ω(N) space. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that computes the fractal dimension in a single pass, using a constant amount of memory relative to data cardinality. Experimental results on synthetic and real world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.     

A pilot study on the effects of cultivation conditions of chicory (Cichorium intybus L.) roots on the levels of sesquiterpene lactones in chicons

 One of the quality parameters of chicory (Cichorium intybus L.) is its slightly bitter taste which is caused by sesquiterpene lactones. As the quality of chicons is highly dependent on the quality of the roots, the effects of the cultivation conditions of the roots on the levels of sesquiterpene lactones in chicons were investigated. Roots from a collection of 11 commercially available and 2 experimental chicory cultivars were grown at five different locations with two nitrogen manuring levels to evaluate the differences in sesquiterpene lactone levels as measured with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs). There were significant differences (P<0.001) between cultivars in both lactucopicrin and lactucin-like (lactucin, 8-deoxylactucin and their 11β,13-dihydro derivatives) sesquiterpene lactone levels. In addition, a significant (P=0.006 and P=0.019, respectively) effect of additional nitrogen manuring was observed on the levels of lactucopicrin and lactucin-like sesquiterpene lactones. The interaction of cultivar with nitrogen manuring had a significant (P=0.013) effect on the level of lactucin-like sesquiterpene lactones. Furthermore, the lactucopicrin level was significantly influenced by the interactions of the cultivar with the nitrogen manuring level (P<0.001), with the location (P=0.001) and with both the nitrogen manuring level and location (P<0.001). The results indicate that it may be possible to influence the level of the bitter sesquiterpene lactones and, consequently, to influence the taste of chicons by cultivar choice and/or cultivation location and conditions. Received: 17 December 1996     

An evolutionary algorithm that constructs recurrent neural networks

Standard methods for simultaneously inducing the structure and weights of recurrent neural networks limit every task to an assumed class of architectures. Such a simplification is necessary since the interactions between network structure and function are not well understood. Evolutionary computations, which include genetic algorithms and evolutionary programming, are population-based search methods that have shown promise in many similarly complex tasks. This paper argues that genetic algorithms are inappropriate for network acquisition and describes an evolutionary program, called GNARL, that simultaneously acquires both the structure and weights for recurrent networks. GNARL's empirical acquisition method allows for the emergence of complex behaviors and topologies that are potentially excluded by the artificial architectural constraints imposed in standard network induction methods.     

Black-to-transmissive electrochromism of azulene-based donor–acceptor copolymers complemented by poly(4-styrene sulfonic acid)-doped poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)

A series of azulene–carbazole–2,1,3-benzothiadiazole (BTD) conjugated terpolymers were synthesized and their electrochemical and electrochromic properties were studied. The terpolymer containing a small amount of BTD units exhibits significantly higher electrochromic contrast and faster switching speed than azulene–carbazole alternating copolymer under low potentials because the BTD units act as electron acceptors, facilitating electron removal from azulene and carbazole units (electron donors) upon oxidation and hence leading to a lower oxidation potential. A complementary electrochromic device (ECD) was fabricated using the terpolymer as the anodically coloring layer and poly(4-styrene sulfonic acid)-doped poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT:PSS) as the cathodically coloring layer. The ECD exhibits black-to-transmissive electrochromism as the absorption bands of the two polymers are complementary to each other in covering the whole visible region and they can be switched simultaneously under relatively low potentials.     

A study on the effects of sample pre-treatment on the amount of sesquiterpene lactones found in chicory (Cichorium Intybus L.) by ELISA and by HPLC

 The effects of sample preparation on the amount of some sesquiterpene lactones, i.e. bitter compounds, extracted from chicory (Cichorium intybus L.) have been studied. Sample preparation was performed using water or a citric acid solution both with and without cellulolytic and pectolytic enzymes. The concentrations of sesquiterpene lactones in the samples were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The greatest amounts of sesquiterpene lactones were obtained by treatment of the chicory samples in water in the presence of the enzymes. Evidence was obtained that both free and glucosylated sesquiterpene lactones are measured in the specific ELISAs. Received: 28 February 1996/Revised version: 10 June 1996     

Empirical models to correlate the basic physical and chemical indices of modified rice bran and mustard oil

Modified rice bran oil (RBO) and modified mustard oil (MO) were prepared by adding oleic acid and oxidized oil separately. The physical and chemical indices like dielectric constant, viscosity, peroxide value (PV), acid value (AV), free fatty acids (FFA), iodine value (IV), and saponification value (SV) of pure and modified RO and MO were determined and correlated. Dielectric constant and viscosity were found to decrease in a non-linear fashion with increase in temperature (30°C–75°C). The dependence of dielectric constant and viscosity with temperature was investigated using model empirical equations. The dielectric variation was studied using Akerlof and Oshry’s model equations, which exhibited high dependency of R² ranges from 0.99 to 0.997. The behaviour of viscosity with temperature was studied with Wright’s equation and the correlation coefficient (R²) was found to be 0.998. Model equations were developed, which relates dielectric constant with IV, SV, and PV with the regression coefficients R² = 0.955, 0.936, and 0.994, respectively. The developed equations can be used in processing, pipelining, and to predict the parameters at a desired temperature. On comparing the correlations between the physical and chemical properties of the oil samples, RBO and its modified forms exhibited more oxidative stability than modified MO.