CMB Spectral μ\mu-Distortion of Multiple Inflation Scenario

In multiple inflation scenario having two inflations with an intermediate matter-dominated phase, the power spectrum is estimated to be enhanced on scales smaller than the horizon size at the beginning of the second inflation, $k > k_{\rm b}$. We require $k_{\rm b} > 10 {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ to make sure that the enhanced power spectrum is consistent with large scale observation of cosmic microwave background (CMB). We consider the CMB spectral distortions generated by the dissipation of acoustic waves to constrain the power spectrum. The $\mu$-distortion value can be $10$ times larger than the expectation of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model ($\mu_{\Lambda\mathrm{CDM}} \simeq 2 \times 10^{-8}$) for $k_{\rm b} \lesssim 10^3 {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, while the $y$-distortion is hardly affected by the enhancement of the power spectrum.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Effects of emotion coaching group programme for mothers of preschool children with smart device overdependence: a mixed methods study

Background Smart device overdependence adversely affects the overall development of preschool children. This study aimed to provide an emotion coaching group programme to mothers raising preschool children who are overly dependent on smart devices and to confirm the programmes effectiveness. Methods This concurrent embedded mixed methods study used a non-equivalent control group pre-post design to verify the quantitative effect of the programme, and a descriptive research design to verify the qualitative effect. The study collected data from June 2019 to March 2021 from 51 (25 experimental, 26 control) mothers raising children aged 3–6 years in South Korea. The quantitative study examined the effects of an eight-session programme, conducted once a week for two hours, on mothers emotional intelligence, parenting behaviour, and their childrens attachment stability and smart device overdependence using a non-equivalent control group pre-post design. The analysis used a generalized estimate equation. For qualitative research, focus group interviews were used as a descriptive research design method, and content analysis was used for analysis. Results Quantitatively, the results showed significant differences between the experimental and control groups in terms of changes in maternal emotional intelligence (χ2 = 14.99, p = .001), maternal positive parenting behaviour (χ2 = 9.32, p = .009), childrens unstable attachment to their mothers (χ2 = 9.49, p = .009), and childrens overdependence on smart devices (χ2 = 14.48, p = .001). Qualitatively, the study derived five themes for the experiences of mothers who participated in the programme: hope for desirable parenting without emotional difficulties, feelings touched by reflection, warm but authoritative parenting, children who became responsible by gaining psychological stability, and changed view of my home. Conclusions The emotion coaching group programme was effective in improving the emotional intelligence and parenting behaviour of mothers raising preschool children. The programme also improved preschool childrens attachment stability to their mothers and overdependence on smart devices. The programme can be useful in community practice, and the present study can be used as evidence for education and research related to device overdependence

DFX: A Low-latency Multi-FPGA Appliance for Accelerating Transformer-based Text Generation

Transformer is a deep learning language model widely used for natural language processing (NLP) services in datacenters. Among transformer models, Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has achieved remarkable performance in text generation, or natural language generation (NLG), which needs the processing of a large input context in the summarization stage, followed by the generation stage that produces a single word at a time. The conventional platforms such as GPU are specialized for the parallel processing of large inputs in the summarization stage, but their performance significantly degrades in the generation stage due to its sequential characteristic. Therefore, an efficient hardware platform is required to address the high latency caused by the sequential characteristic of text generation. In this paper, we present DFX, a multi-FPGA acceleration appliance that executes GPT-2 model inference end-to-end with low latency and high throughput in both summarization and generation stages. DFX uses model parallelism and optimized dataflow that is model-and-hardware-aware for fast simultaneous workload execution among devices. Its compute cores operate on custom instructions and provide GPT-2 operations end-to-end. We implement the proposed hardware architecture on four Xilinx Alveo U280 FPGAs and utilize all of the channels of the high bandwidth memory (HBM) and the maximum number of compute resources for high hardware efficiency. DFX achieves 5.58x speedup and 3.99x energy efficiency over four NVIDIA V100 GPUs on the modern GPT-2 model. DFX is also 8.21x more cost-effective than the GPU appliance, suggesting that it is a promising solution for text generation workloads in cloud datacenters.Comment: Extension of HOTCHIPS 2022 and accepted in MICRO 202

nuQmm: Quantized MatMul for Efficient Inference of Large-Scale Generative Language Models

The recent advance of self-supervised learning associated with the Transformer architecture enables natural language processing (NLP) to exhibit extremely low perplexity. Such powerful models demand ever-increasing model size and, thus, large amounts of computations and memory footprints. In this paper, we propose an efficient inference framework for large-scale generative language models. As the key to reducing model size, we quantize weights by a non-uniform quantization method. Then, quantized matrix multiplications are accelerated by our proposed kernel, called nuQmm, which allows a wide trade-off between compression ratio and accuracy. Our proposed nuQmm reduces the latency of not only each GPU but also the entire inference of large LMs because a high compression ratio (by low-bit quantization) mitigates the minimum required number of GPUs. Assuming 2-bit quantization, we demonstrate that nuQmm can reduce latency to generate each token for OPT-175B (that requires 8 GPUs without nuQmm) by 47.3% using 8 GPUs or by 23.2% using only 2 GPUs.Comment: 15 pages (including 5 pages of References & Appendix), 14 figures, 7 table

Carrier transport mechanisms of hybrid ZnO nanorod-polymer LEDs

A hybrid polymer-nanorod (NR) light-emitting diode (LED), consisting of a hole-conducting polymer poly (9-vinyl carbazole) (PVK) and ZnO nanorod (NR) composite, with the device structure of glass/indium-tin-oxide (ITO)/PEDOT:PSS/(PVK + ZnO nanorods)/Al is fabricated through a simple spin coating technique. TEM images shows inhomogeneous deposition and the agglomeration of ZnO NRs, which is explained through their low probability of adsorption on PVK due to two-dimensional structural property. In the current-voltage characteristics, negative differential resistance (NDR) phenomenon is observed corresponding to device structure without ZnO NRs. The carrier transport behavior in the LED device is well described by both ohmic and space-chargelimited-current (SCLC) mechanisms. Broad blue electroluminescence (EL) consisting of two sub peaks, are centered at 441 nm and the other at 495 nm, is observed, which indicates that the ZnO nanorod play a role as a recombination center for excitons. The red shift in the position of the EL compared to that photoluminescence is well explained through band offsets at the heterojunction between the PVK and ZnO NRs

Comparison of First-Line Dual Combination Treatments in Hypertension: Real-World Evidence from Multinational Heterogeneous Cohorts.

Background and objectives: 2018 ESC/ESH Hypertension guideline recommends 2-drug combination as initial anti-hypertensive therapy. However, real-world evidence for effectiveness of recommended regimens remains limited. We aimed to compare the effectiveness of first-line anti-hypertensive treatment combining 2 out of the following classes: angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors/angiotensin-receptor blocker (A), calcium channel blocker (C), and thiazide-type diuretics (D).Methods: Treatment-naïve hypertensive adults without cardiovascular disease (CVD) who initiated dual anti-hypertensive medications were identified in 5 databases from US and Korea. The patients were matched for each comparison set by large-scale propensity score matching. Primary endpoint was all-cause mortality. Myocardial infarction, heart failure, stroke, and major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events as a composite outcome comprised the secondary measure.Results: A total of 987,983 patients met the eligibility criteria. After matching, 222,686, 32,344, and 38,513 patients were allocated to A+C vs. A+D, C+D vs. A+C, and C+D vs. A+D comparison, respectively. There was no significant difference in the mortality during total of 1,806,077 person-years: A+C vs. A+D (hazard ratio [HR], 1.08; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.97-1.20; p=0.127), C+D vs. A+C (HR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.87-1.01; p=0.067), and C+D vs. A+D (HR, 1.18; 95% CI, 0.95-1.47; p=0.104). A+C was associated with a slightly higher risk of heart failure (HR, 1.09; 95% CI, 1.01-1.18; p=0.040) and stroke (HR, 1.08; 95% CI, 1.01-1.17; p=0.040) than A+D.Conclusions: There was no significant difference in mortality among A+C, A+D, and C+D combination treatment in patients without previous CVD. This finding was consistent across multi-national heterogeneous cohorts in real-world practice

The experience of unmarried mothers raising their children in residential facilities: a phenomenological qualitative study

Background : Birth outside of marriage has been gradually increasing in Korea. However, social perception of unmarried mothers is still negative, and a number of them are not accepted by their family. Therefore, the Korean government has implemented a policy to provide financial aid and communal residence to unmarried mothers who cannot raise children with their family, or afford residence. Unmarried young mothers who rely on this government policy have low economic independence and social adaptation skills. Additionally, they have a high chance of encountering numerous challenges in raising children due to their living conditions in residential facilities and social prejudice. This study was conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of the lived experience of unmarried mothers raising children in residential facilities. Methods : Data were collected through in-depth interviews with nine unmarried mothers living in residential facilities with their children. An interpretative phenomenological analysis was conducted to analyze the data. Results : The findings revealed that unmarried mothers struggled with various difficulties given the limitations of living in the facility, but attempted to navigate their uncertain future with the determination to be good mothers. Three main themes and eight sub-themes emerged: (1) adaptation to the identity of “unmarried mother”, (2) willingly undertaking the heavy burden of childrearing, (3) indispensable but insufficient supports from facilities. Participants had childrearing responsibilities, and tried to be good mothers for their children while struggling to adapt to their new identities. However, their self-doubt as a “good mother” and the absence of the child's father made them feel sorry for their child. Their daily experiences raising children and simultaneously preparing for their own independence were exhausting. The supports from the facilities were helpful but unsatisfactory and led to various psychosocial difficulties such as anxiety, depression, fear, guilty, and anger in unmarried mothers. Conclusions : Besides information and resources for parenting and independence, active approaches are needed to improve the psychological stability of unmarried mothers raising their children in facilities, and sustain a long-term socioeconomic support system. Thoughtful services tailored to mothers and children are also needed, instead of standardized services.This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) under grant by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2019R1A2B5B01070519)

Evaluation of low-pass genome sequencing in polygenic risk score calculation for Parkinsons disease

Background Low-pass sequencing (LPS) has been extensively investigated for applicability to various genetic studies due to its advantages over genotype array data including cost-effectiveness. Predicting the risk of complex diseases such as Parkinsons disease (PD) using polygenic risk score (PRS) based on the genetic variations has shown decent prediction accuracy. Although ultra-LPS has been shown to be effective in PRS calculation, array data has been favored to the majority of PRS analysis, especially for PD. Results Using eight high-coverage WGS, we assessed imputation approaches for downsampled LPS data ranging from 0.5 × to 7.0 × . We demonstrated that uncertain genotype calls of LPS diminished imputation accuracy, and an imputation approach using genotype likelihoods was plausible for LPS. Additionally, comparing imputation accuracies between LPS and simulated array illustrated that LPS had higher accuracies particularly at rare frequencies. To evaluate ultra-low coverage data in PRS calculation for PD, we prepared low-coverage WGS and genotype array of 87 PD cases and 101 controls. Genotype imputation of array and downsampled LPS were conducted using a population-specific reference panel, and we calculated risk scores based on the PD-associated SNPs from an East Asian meta-GWAS. The PRS models discriminated cases and controls as previously reported when both LPS and genotype array were used. Also strong correlations in PRS models for PD between LPS and genotype array were discovered. Conclusions Overall, this study highlights the potentials of LPS under 1.0 × followed by genotype imputation in PRS calculation and suggests LPS as attractive alternatives to genotype array in the area of precision medicine for PD.This work has been supported by Macrogen Inc. (Grant No. MGR20-01)

Search for the Sagittarius Tidal Stream of Axion Dark Matter around 4.55 μ\mueV

We report the first search for the Sagittarius tidal stream of axion dark matter around 4.55 $\mu$eV using CAPP-12TB haloscope data acquired in March of 2022. Our result excluded the Sagittarius tidal stream of Dine-Fischler-Srednicki-Zhitnitskii and Kim-Shifman-Vainshtein-Zakharov axion dark matter densities of $\rho_a\gtrsim0.184$ and $\gtrsim0.025$ GeV/cm$^{3}$, respectively, over a mass range from 4.51 to 4.59 $\mu$eV at a 90% confidence level.Comment: 6 pages, 7 Figures, PRD Letter accepte