SpinLink: An interconnection system for the SpiNNaker biologically inspired multi-computer

SpiNNaker is a large-scale biologically-inspired multi-computer designed to model very heavily distributed problems, with the flagship application being the simulation of large neural networks. The project goal is to have one million processors included in a single machine, which consequently span many thousands of circuit boards. A computer of this scale imposes large communication requirements between these boards, and requires an extensible method of connecting to external equipment such as sensors, actuators and visualisation systems. This paper describes two systems that can address each of these problems.Firstly, SpinLink is a proposed method of connecting the SpiNNaker boards by using time-division multiplexing (TDM) to allow eight SpiNNaker links to run at maximum bandwidth between two boards. SpinLink will be deployed on Spartan-6 FPGAs and uses a locally generated clock that can be paused while the asynchronous links from SpiNNaker are sending data, thus ensuring a fast and glitch-free response. Secondly, SpiNNterceptor is a separate system, currently in the early stages of design, that will build upon SpinLink to address the important external I/O issues faced by SpiNNaker. Specifically, spare resources in the FPGAs will be used to implement the debugging and I/O interfacing features of SpiNNterceptor

Demographic Shifts and Labour Force Participation Rates in Canada

Labour force participation rates vary greatly by age, with persons 55 and over having much lower participation rates than younger persons. Consequently, changes in the demographic composition of the population can exert a long-run effect on aggregate participation rates. In the third article of the symposium, Bob Dugan and Benoît Robidoux examine the impact of demographic shifts on labour force participation in Canada. They use an accounting framework and plausible trend participation rates for 16 demographic groups with source population estimates to estimate an aggregate structural participation rate for Canada. They find that the ageing of the population has already started to exert downward pressure on the aggregate participation rate in Canada due to longer life expectancy and the resulting growing proportion of the population in the low-participation rate 65 and over age group. The movement of the baby boom generation into the 65 and over group in coming years will intensify this trend. Between 1989 and 1997 they find that the demographic composition effect reduced the aggregate participation rate by almost 1 percentage point, and that from now to 2030 it will reduce the participation rate by an additional 8.5 points. Of course, greater than expected trend increases in labour force participation rates by older age groups could offset some of this composition effect. The authors point out that changes in demographic composition had virtually no effect on the participation rate in the 1990s in the United States as the share of the population 65 and over was stable. This situation reflects the fact that the United States became an “older” society earlier than Canada due to an earlier and smaller baby boom and a higher average age for immigrants. Dugan and Robidoux calculate a trend participation rate of 66.2 in 1997, 1.4 percentage points above the actual rate of 64.8 per cent. Based on this rate they conclude that about one half of the 2.7 point decline in the participation rate in the 1990s was structural and one half cyclical.Canada, Labour Force Participation, Labor Force Participation, Participation Rate, Labour Force Participation Rate, Labor Force Participation Rate, Age Structure, Age, Sex, Gender, Aging, Ageing

Blue harvest: inland fisheries as an ecosystem service

Global food production has increased greatly in recent years and rural livelihoods are much improved in many regions. Yet, despite this clear progress rural poverty and food insecurity remain deeply entrenched in many areas, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In response the international community has renewed calls for increased commitment to meeting the needs of the world's poor. This report, commissioned as a contribution to the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity taking place in Nagoya, Japan, not only underlines the value of freshwater fisheries but provides guidance on how the ecosystem approach can be applied in order to sustain future harvests.Inland fisheries, Nutrition, Food security, Sustainability, Ecosystems

Kani: A Lightweight and Highly Hackable Framework for Building Language Model Applications

Language model applications are becoming increasingly popular and complex, often including features like tool usage and retrieval augmentation. However, existing frameworks for such applications are often opinionated, deciding for developers how their prompts ought to be formatted and imposing limitations on customizability and reproducibility. To solve this we present Kani: a lightweight, flexible, and model-agnostic open-source framework for building language model applications. Kani helps developers implement a variety of complex features by supporting the core building blocks of chat interaction: model interfacing, chat management, and robust function calling. All Kani core functions are easily overridable and well documented to empower developers to customize functionality for their own needs. Kani thus serves as a useful tool for researchers, hobbyists, and industry professionals alike to accelerate their development while retaining interoperability and fine-grained control.Comment: In submission to NLP-OS

The Littlest Higgs

We present an economical theory of natural electroweak symmetry breaking, generalizing an approach based on deconstruction. This theory is the smallest extension of the Standard Model to date that stabilizes the electroweak scale with a naturally light Higgs and weakly coupled new physics at TeV energies. The Higgs is one of a set of pseudo Goldstone bosons in an $SU(5)/SO(5)$ nonlinear sigma model. The symmetry breaking scale $f$ is around a TeV, with the cutoff \Lambda \lsim 4\pi f \sim 10 TeV. A single electroweak doublet, the ``little Higgs'', is automatically much lighter than the other pseudo Goldstone bosons. The quartic self-coupling for the little Higgs is generated by the gauge and Yukawa interactions with a natural size $O(g^2,\lambda_t^2)$, while the top Yukawa coupling generates a negative mass squared triggering electroweak symmetry breaking. Beneath the TeV scale the effective theory is simply the minimal Standard Model. The new particle content at TeV energies consists of one set of spin one bosons with the same quantum numbers as the electroweak gauge bosons, an electroweak singlet quark with charge 2/3, and an electroweak triplet scalar. One loop quadratically divergent corrections to the Higgs mass are cancelled by interactions with these additional particles.Comment: 15 pages. References added. Corrected typos in the discussion of the top Yukawa couplin

Matched-pair analysis of hematopoietic progenitor cell mobilization using G-CSF vs. cyclophosphamide, etoposide, and G-CSF: Enhanced CD34+ cell collections are not necessarily cost-effective

AbstractUsing matched-pair analysis, we compared two popular methods of stem cell mobilization in 24 advanced-stage breast cancer patients who underwent two consecutive mobilizing procedures as part of a tandem transplant protocol. For the first cycle, 10 microg/kg/day granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) was given and apheresis commenced on day 4 and continued for < or =5 days (median 3 days). One week after the first cycle of apheresis, 4000 mg/m2 cyclophosphamide, 400 mg/m2 etoposide, and 10 microg/kg G-CSF were administered for < or =16 days (cycle 2). Apheresis was initiated when the white blood cell (WBC) count exceeded 5000 cells/microL and continued for < or =5 days (median 3 days). Mean values of peripheral blood WBC (31,700+/-3200 vs. 30,700+/-3300/microL) were not significantly different between cycles 1 and 2. Mean number of mononuclear cells (MNC) collected per day was slightly greater with G-CSF mobilization than with the combination of chemotherapy and G-CSF (2.5+/-0.21x10(8) vs. 1.8+/-0.19x10(8) cells/kg). Mean daily CD34+ cell yield, however, was nearly six times higher (12.9+/-4.4 vs. 2.2+/-0.5x10(6)/kg; p = 0.01) with chemotherapy plus G-CSF. With G-CSF alone, 13% of aphereses reached the target dose of 5x10(6) CD34+ cells/kg in one collection vs. 57% with chemotherapy plus G-CSF. Transfusions of red blood cells or platelets were necessary in 18 of 24 patients in cycle 2. Three patients were hospitalized with fever for a median of 3 days after cycle 2. No patients received transfusions or required hospitalization during mobilization with G-CSF alone. Resource utilization (cost of drugs, aphereses, cryopreservation, transfusions, hospitalization) was calculated comparing the median number of collections to obtain a target CD34+ cell dose of 5x10(6) cells/kg: four using G-CSF vs. one using the combination in this data set. Resources for G-CSF mobilization cost $7326 vs.$8693 for the combination, even though more apheresis procedures were performed using G-CSF mobilization. The cost of chemotherapy administration, more doses of G-CSF, transfusions, and hospitalizations caused cyclophosphamide, etoposide, and G-CSF to be more expensive than G-CSF alone. A less toxic and less expensive treatment than cyclophosphamide, etoposide, and G-CSF is needed to be more cost-effective than G-CSF alone for peripheral blood progenitor cell mobilization.Biol Blood Marrow Transplant 1999;5(6):379-85

The role of inputs of marine wrack and carrion in sandy-beach ecosystems: A global review

Sandy beaches are iconic interfaces that functionally link the ocean with the land via the flow of organic matter from the sea. These cross-ecosystem fluxes often comprise uprooted seagrass and dislodged macroalgae that can form substantial accumulations of detritus, termed ‘wrack’, on sandy beaches. In addition, the tissue of the carcasses of marine animals that regularly wash up on beaches form a rich food source (‘carrion’) for a diversity of scavenging animals. Here, we provide a global review of how wrack and carrion provide spatial subsidies that shape the structure and functioning of sandy-beach ecosystems (sandy beaches and adjacent surf zones), which typically have little in situ primary production. We also examine the spatial scaling of the influence of these processes across the broader land- and seascape, and identify key gaps in our knowledge to guide future research directions and priorities. Large quantities of detrital kelp and seagrass can flow into sandy-beach ecosystems, where microbial decomposers and animals process it. The rates of wrack supply and its retention are influenced by the oceanographic processes that transport it, the geomorphology and landscape context of the recipient beaches, and the condition, life history and morphological characteristics of the macrophyte taxa that are the ultimate source of wrack. When retained in beach ecosystems, wrack often creates hotspots of microbial metabolism, secondary productivity, biodiversity, and nutrient remineralization. Nutrients are produced during wrack breakdown, and these can return to coastal waters in surface flows (swash) and aquifers discharging into the subtidal surf. Beach-cast kelp often plays a key trophic role, being an abundant and preferred food source for mobile, semi-aquatic invertebrates that channel imported algal matter to predatory invertebrates, fish, and birds. The role of beach-cast marine carrion is likely to be underestimated, as it can be consumed rapidly by highly mobile scavengers (e.g. foxes, coyotes, raptors, vultures). These consumers become important vectors in transferring marine productivity inland, thereby linking marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Whilst deposits of organic matter on sandy-beach ecosystems underpin a range of ecosystem functions and services, they can be at variance with aesthetic perceptions resulting in widespread activities, such as ‘beach cleaning and grooming’. This practice diminishes the energetic base of food webs, intertidal fauna, and biodiversity. Global declines in seagrass beds and kelp forests (linked to global warming) are predicted to cause substantial reductions in the amounts of marine organic matter reaching many beach ecosystems, likely causing flow-on effects for food webs and biodiversity. Similarly, future sea-level rise and increased storm frequency are likely to alter profoundly the physical attributes of beaches, which in turn can change the rates at which beaches retain and process the influxes of wrack and animal carcasses. Conservation of the multi-faceted ecosystem services that sandy beaches provide will increasingly need to encompass a greater societal appreciation and the safeguarding of ecological functions reliant on beach-cast organic matter on innumerable ocean shores worldwide