Application of autoregressive spectral analysis to missing data problems

Time series solutions for spectral analysis in missing data problems use reconstruction of the missing data, or a maximum likelihood approach that analyzes only the available measured data. Maximum likelihood estimation yields the most accurate spectra. An approximate maximum likelihood algorithm is presented that uses only previous observations falling in a finite interval to compute the likelihood, instead of all previous observations. The resulting nonlinear estimation algorithm requires no user-provided initial solution, is suited for order selection, and can give very accurate spectra even if less than 10% of the data remains.     

On the Subjective Quality of Social Justice: The Role of Affect as Information in the Psychology of Justice Judgments.

This article argues that it is not uncommon for people forming justice judgments to lack information that is most relevant in the particular situation. In information-uncertain conditions, people may therefore construct justice judgments by relying on how they feel about the events they have encountered, and justice judgments may hence be strongly influenced by affect information. Findings show that in information-uncertain conditions, the affective states that people had been in prior and unrelated to the justice event indeed strongly influenced their justice judgments. These findings thus reveal that in situations of information uncertainty, people's judgments of justice can be very subjective, susceptible to affective states that have no logical relationship with the justice judgments they are constructing. Implications for the social psychology of justice and the literature on social cognition and affect are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Space sickness on earth

During the first days in space, i.e., after a transition from 1G to 0G, more than 50% of the astro- (and cosmonauts) suffer from the Space Adaptation Syndrome (SAS).The symptoms of SAS, like nausea and dizziness, are especially provoked by head movements. Astronauts have mentioned close similarities between the symptoms of SAS and the symptoms they experienced after a 1 hour centrifuge run on Earth, i.e., after a transition from 3G to 1G (denoted by Sickness Induced by Centrifugation, SIC). During several space missions, we related susceptibility to SAS and to SIC in 11 astronauts and found 4 of them being susceptible to both SIC and SAS, and 7 being not susceptible to SIC nor to SAS. This correspondence in susceptibility suggests that SIC and SAS share the same underlying mechanism. To further study this mechanism, several vestibular parameters have been investigated (e.g. postural stability, vestibularly driven eye movements, subjective vertical). We found some striking changes in individual cases that are possibly due to the centrifuge run. However, the variability between subjects generally is very large, making physiological links to SIC and SAS still hard to find.     

VH gene family utilization of anti-acetylcholine receptor antibodies in experimental autoimmune myasthenia gravis

The immunoglobulin heavy chain (VH) gene family usage in experimental autoimmune myasthenia gravis (EAMG) model was investigated by RNA slot blot hybridization using VH gene family specific probes. Anti-acetylcholine receptor (AChR) monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) isolated from susceptible C57BL/6 and resistant BALB/c mice were found to be encoded by VH genes from at least six different families. The Vgam3.8 family was overrepresented in alpha-bungarotoxin blocking mAbs. Expression of cross-reactive idiotypes by anti-AChR mAbs was irrespective of the VH gene family usage. Strain dependent differences in susceptibility for EAMG were not reflected in an aberrant VH gene family usage of anti-AChR mAbs.     

Synthesis, estrogen receptor binding, and tissue distribution of a new iodovinylestradiol derivative (17alpha,20E)-21-[123I]Iodo-11beta-nitrato-19-norp regna-1,3,5 (10),20-tetraene-3,17-diol (E-[123I]NIVE)

We have synthesized and evaluated E-11beta-nitrato-17alpha-iodovinylestradiol (E-NIVE; E-3c) and its 123I-labelled form, as a new potential radioligand for imaging of estrogen receptor (ER)-positive human breast tumors. E-[123I]NIVE was prepared by stereospecific iododestannylation of the E-tri-n-butylstannylvinyl precursor (E-2c), obtained from reaction of 11beta-nitrato-estrone (8) with E-tributylstannylvinyllithium. In competitive binding studies, E-NIVE proved to have high binding affinity for both the rat and the human ER (Ki 280-730 pM), without significant binding to human sex hormone binding globulin. Distribution studies in normal and mammary tumor-bearing rats showed specific ER-mediated uptake of E-[123I]NIVE in the estrogen target tissues, i.e., uterus, ovaries, pituitary, and hypothalamus, but not in the mammary tumors. Selective retention in these target tissues, including tumor tissue, resulted in significant increases over time for the target tissue-to-muscle uptake ratios, but not for the target tissue-to-fat uptake ratios. The tumor-to-fat uptake ratio even appeared constantly below 1. In the primary estrogen target tissues, E-[123I]NIVE displayed high specific ER-mediated uptake and retention, which resulted in moderate target-to-nontarget tissue uptake ratios. In contrast, in tumor tissue, E-[123I]NIVE uptake appeared to be rather low and not ER-specific. As a consequence, E-[123I]NIVE appears to be a less favorable radioligand for ER imaging in breast cancer than the previously studied stereoisomers of 11beta-methoxy-17alpha-[123I]iodovinylestradiol (E- and Z-[123I]MIVE; [123I]E- and [123I]Z-3b).     

On the detection of custom memory allocators in C binaries

Many reverse engineering techniques for data structures rely on the knowledge of memory allocation routines. Typically, they interpose on the system’s malloc and free functions, and track each chunk of memory thus allocated as a data structure. However, many performance-critical applications implement their own custom memory allocators. Examples include webservers, database management systems, and compilers like gcc and clang. As a result, current binary analysis techniques for tracking data structures fail on such binaries. We present MemBrush, a new tool to detect memory allocation and deallocation functions in stripped binaries with high accuracy. We evaluated the technique on a large number of real world applications that use custom memory allocators. We demonstrate that MemBrush can detect allocators/deallocators with a high accuracy which is 52 out of 59 for allocators, and 29 out of 31 for deallocators in SPECINT 2006. As we show, we can furnish existing reverse engineering tools with detailed information about the memory management API, and as a result perform an analysis of the actual application specific data structures designed by the programmer. Our system uses dynamic analysis and detects memory allocation and deallocation routines by searching for functions that comply with a set of generic characteristics of allocators and deallocators.     

Restoration of stormwater retention capacity at the allotment-scale through a novel economic instrument

Urbanisation results in changes to runoff behaviour which, if not addressed, inevitably degrade receiving waters. To date, most stormwater management has focussed on the streetscape and public open space. Given that much of the catchment imperviousness is located on private land, we developed and tested a novel economic instrument (a uniform price auction) for encouraging allotment-scale stormwater retention. We evaluated bids using an integrated environmental benefit index (EBI), based on the ability of the proposed works to reduce runoff frequency, pollutant loads and to reduce potable water demand. The uniform price auction resulted in 1.4 ha of impervious areas being effectively 'disconnected' from the stormwater system. The EBI provided an objective and transparent method of comparing bids, which varied in the type of works proposed (e.g. rainwater tank, rain-garden), the cost and the resulting environmental benefit. Whilst the pilot auction was a success, the public subsidy of works undertaken was around 85%, meaning that property owners a relatively small private benefit in the works. Future auction rounds will be revised to (i) test an EBI which is more focussed on the protection of streams (assessing changes to runoff frequency, baseflow volumes and water quality) and (ii) provide an auction process which is simpler to understand, and provides greater practical support for landholders who wish to undertake works.     

Energy optimization for CAN bus and media controls in electric vehicles using deep learning algorithms

The Journal of Supercomputing - This study offers a neural network-based deep learning method for energy optimization modeling in electric vehicles (EV). The pre-processed driving cycle is...     

An annotated corpus for the analysis of VP ellipsis

Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) has been studied in great depth in theoretical linguistics, but empirical studies of VPE are rare. We extend the few previous corpus studies with an annotated corpus of VPE in all 25 sections of the Wall Street Journal corpus (WSJ) distributed with the Penn Treebank. We annotated the raw files using a stand-off annotation scheme that codes the auxiliary verb triggering the elided verb phrase, the start and end of the antecedent, the syntactic type of antecedent (VP, TV, NP, PP or AP), and the type of syntactic pattern between the source and target clauses of the VPE and its antecedent. We found 487 instances of VPE (including predicative ellipsis, antecedent-contained deletion, comparative constructions, and pseudo-gapping) plus 67 cases of related phenomena such as do so anaphora. Inter-annotator agreement was high, with a 0.97 average F-score for three annotators for one section of the WSJ. Our annotation is theory neutral, and has better coverage than earlier efforts that relied on automatic methods, e.g. simply searching the parsed version of the Penn Treebank for empty VP’s achieves a high precision (0.95) but low recall (0.58) when compared with our manual annotation. The distribution of VPE source–target patterns deviates highly from the standard examples found in the theoretical linguistics literature on VPE, once more underlining the value of corpus studies. The resulting corpus will be useful for studying VPE phenomena as well as for evaluating natural language processing systems equipped with ellipsis resolution algorithms, and we propose evaluation measures for VPE detection and VPE antecedent selection. The stand-off annotation is freely available for research purposes.     

Low-Latency Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication

This paper presents a low-latency algorithm designed for parallel computer architectures to compute the scalar multiplication of elliptic curve points based on approaches from cryptographic side-channel analysis. A graphics processing unit implementation using a standardized elliptic curve over a 224-bit prime field, complying with the new 112-bit security level, computes the scalar multiplication in 1.9?ms on the NVIDIA GTX 500 architecture family. The presented methods and implementation considerations can be applied to any parallel 32-bit architecture.