Spurious Issues Research Articles

Optimized Design of Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer Based on Hermite Interpolation

To address the issue of suboptimal spectral purity in Direct Digital Frequency Synthesis (DDFS) within resource-constrained environments, this paper proposes an optimized DDFS technique based on cubic Hermite interpolation. Initially, a DDFS hardware architecture is implemented on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); subsequently, essential interpolation parameters are extracted by combining the derivative relations of sine and cosine functions with a dual-port Read-Only Memory (ROM) structure using the cubic Hermite interpolation method to reconstruct high-fidelity target waveforms. This approach effectively mitigates spurious issues caused by amplitude quantization during the DDFS digitalization process while reducing data node storage units. Moreover, this paper introduces single-quadrant ROM compression technology to further diminish the required storage space. Experimental results indicate that, compared to traditional DDFS methods, the optimization scheme proposed in this work achieves a ROM resource compression ratio of 1792:1 and a 14-bit output Spurious-Free Dynamic Range (SFDR) of −88.134 dBc, effectively enhancing amplitude quantization precision and significantly lowering spurious levels. This significantly improves amplitude quantization precision and reduces spurious levels. The proposed scheme demonstrates notable advantages in both spectral performance and resource utilization efficiency, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained embedded systems and high-performance applications such as radar and communication systems.

Understanding static code warnings: An incremental AI approach

Knowledge-based systems reason over some knowledge base. Hence, an important issue for such systems is how to acquire the knowledge needed for their inference. This paper assesses active learning methods for acquiring knowledge for “static code warnings”.Static code analysis is a widely-used method for detecting bugs and security vulnerabilities in software systems. As software becomes more complex, analysis tools also report lists of increasingly complex warnings that developers need to address on a daily basis. Such static code analysis tools are usually over-cautious; i.e. they often offer many warnings about spurious issues. Previous research work shows that about 35% to 91 % warnings reported as bugs by SA tools are actually unactionable (i.e., warnings that would not be acted on by developers because they are falsely suggested as bugs).Experienced developers know which errors are important and which can be safely ignored. How can we capture that experience? This paper reports on an incremental AI tool that watches humans reading false alarm reports. Using an incremental support vector machine mechanism, this AI tool can quickly learn to distinguish spurious false alarms from more serious matters that deserve further attention.In this work, nine open-source projects are employed to evaluate our proposed model on the features extracted by previous researchers and identify the actionable warnings in a priority order given by our algorithm. We observe that our model can identify over 90% of actionable warnings when our methods tell humans to ignore 70 to 80% of the warnings.

"The Prevention of That Abominable Mixture and Spurious Issue": Continuity in the Prosecution of Miscegenation in Virginian Laws and Court Decisions, 1630-1691

In the historical debate over the legitimation of Virginian black slavery in the seventeenth century, some historians argue that the legal prosecution of interracial sexual relations was a calculated effort to institute slavery. Conversely, others assert that lawmakers and law enforcers did not actively discourage interracial sex until they enacted legislation that explicitly forbade miscegenation in the 1660s and again in the 1690s. However, an examination of Virginian laws and court decisions regarding fornication from 1630 to 1691 reveals a different story. Colonial authorities inherited a revulsion towards miscegenation from the English intellectual and religious tradition, and they used three different legal methods to prevent sex between blacks and whites. Before they introduced legislation that explicitly sought to punish whites for miscegenation in the 1660s and 1690s, the secular authorities of the 1630s and 1640s resorted to enforcing moral laws originally meant for the Church courts, and they then introduced general laws against fornication that were disproportionately applied to cases of pre-marital sexual intercourse involving blacks. While the methods of sexually segregating white and black colonists changed over the course of the seventeenth century, the desire to prevent miscegenation was always present in the minds of colonial officials in this era.

The Last Viking Battle

In the spring of 2014, the British Museum put on an exhibition of medieval artifacts called Vikings: Life and Legend. Normally, the exhibition would not have attracted more attention than such exhibitions generally do, but, this time, it became the subject of a heated debate in the British newspaper the Independent--usually not a forum for discussing medieval matters. At issue was whether the exhibition gave a correct picture of these seafaring warriors, as the paper called the Vikings. This debate was particularly interesting because it dragged out some of the skeletons in the closet of Viking scholarship over the past decades--and even centuries--and resulted in a caustic exchange of opinions. In this essay, I would like to discuss how this debate progressed, and then look at a few other spurious issues from the past that relate to the supposed nature of the Vikings and that refuse to go away. On March 4, 2014, the Independent published a review of the exhibition called Vikings: Why Do the Seafaring Warriors Still Intrigue Us? The review, which was written by Boyd Tonkin, the paper's literary editor, was, on the whole, sympathetic as to how the British Museum had presented its subject (Tonkin 2014). (1) Among other things, Tonkin interviewed the curator of the exhibition, Gareth Williams, who told him that the Vikings had not been a bunch of untidy, shaggy blondes and that their lousy reputation resulted from attacking scribe-filled monasteries--which, in today's world, would be equivalent to terrorist attacks on television stations. Williams then explained that the barbaric image of the Vikings had persisted up to the 1960s, when a more cultivated image took hold, and then went on to add that he believed that the truth was probably somewhere in between. Tonkin then proceeded to Oslo, where he interviewed Professor Jan Bill, Oslo University's Professor of Viking Age Archaeology and Curator of the Viking Ship Museum on Bygdoy. Bill told Tonkin that he believed that the high tide of revisionism against viewing the Vikings as barbarians had arrived in the 1980s when the pendulum swung from carnage to culture. Tonkin's article ended with a short discussion of a mass grave found in Weymouth in 2009 where the skeletons of fifty Scandinavian warriors were found. Their injuries were consistent with execution rather than battle. In other words, the Anglo-Saxons were not just innocent victims of vicious Viking attacks; they could be plenty ruthless themselves. It was not long until the backlash against Tonkin's review arrived. It came from Patrick Cockburn, a senior award-winning journalist who also writes for the Independent, and was published on April 6, 2014. The main tide of Cockburn's article was: Vikings Were Feared for a Reason, and a subtitle further explained: World View: Ignore Recent Revisionism. The Norsemen Carried Out Atrocities to Equal Those of the German SS. In his article, Cockburn took aim at his colleague Boyd Tonkin, noting that there seems to be a common disbelief about how nasty wars can be and a common desire to find alternative explanations or excuses for the perpetrators of war crimes. Cockburn went on: In the case of the Vikings, many historians since the Sixties have ignored compelling evidence that they were mass murderers, whose atrocities were equivalent of those carried out by SS divisions invading Poland 75 years ago. Writers all over Europe at the time of the Vikings ... are at one in describing their savagery. But their terrified accounts of what happened were set aside by experts as biased because the eyewitnesses were often monks whose monasteries were prime targets of the raiders. Emphasis was instead put on the role of the Vikings as traders (though their main trade was in slaves), sailors, poets (though the Sagas were written much later) and craftsmen (though the most impressive objects in the Viking hoards were looted from other countries). (Cockburn 2014) For further evidence of Viking atrocities, Cockburn pointed to the work of the eminent British historian Patrick Wormald (1947-2004) who had, among other things, discussed the executions of the kings of East Anglia and Northumbria. …

Reliability Characterization Issues for Nanoscale Flash Memories: A Case Study on 45-nm NOR Devices

This paper shows that the reliability characterization of nanoscale Flash memories requires an accurate control of the adopted experimental tests, preventing spurious issues to emerge and alter the basic conclusions on the investigated reliability constraints. To this aim, the paper reports a case study on a 45-nm NOR technology, where the experimental investigation of the activation energy for damage recovery during post-cycling bakes and of distributed-cycling effects is substantially affected by parasitic threshold-voltage (VT) drifts, activated by the repeated acquisition of the whole array VT map during the experiment. Only when this spurious effect is taken into account, the typical 1.1-eV activation energy for damage recovery and the effectiveness of the conventional distributed-cycling schemes are correctly demonstrated on the investigated technology.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

The Caliban Codex: mud, blood and spurious issues

The internationally known and respected Cherokee Indian artist Jimmie Durham created the conceptual mixed-media installation The Caliban Codex in anticipation of the 1992 quincentennial Columbian celebrations that were held throughout the Americas. He used Shakespeare's The Tempest as a vehicle by which to critique colonialism's appropriation of language and its power to assert colonial authority. He also addressed physiognomy as it was employed during the nineteenth century in a pseudo-scientific endeavour to ‘prove’ the biological legitimacy of racism. In each case Durham employed the methods of mimicry and mockery to address the ambivalent relationship between the coloniser and the colonised as it continues to be experienced.

Book Review: Spencer, R. (1999). Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States

Book Review: Spencer, R. (1999). Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States

Inaccurate data, spurious issues and editorial failure in Cushman’s ‘Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans’

Inaccurate data, spurious issues and editorial failure in Cushman’s ‘Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans’

Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States

Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States

"Black Gal Swing": Color, Class, and Category in Globalized Culture:Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of "Race," Nation and Gender.;Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture.;Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States.

Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of "Race," Nation and Gender. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. New York: Routledge, 1999. 221 pp. Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture. Arthur K. Spears. ed. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999. 242 pp. Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States. Rainier Spencer. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 222 pp.

Spurious issues: race and multiracial identity politics in the United States

Introduction The American Racial Paradigm Federal Racial Categorization Multiracial Identity The Multiracial Category Initiative Final Proposal, Final Recommendation, Final Decision Thinking About Transcending Race

Framing the ethical issues in new reproductive technologies

The framework presented introduces a series of polarities for thinking about the new questions raised by new technologies. The first example is the question of long‐term responsibility for actions as opposed to the survival strategy of focusing on immediate outcome; second, equality as a value as over against comparative justice. Finally, the question of whether there can be limits to the desire for knowledge. If one can frame the limits of a problem and eliminate the spurious issues, an arena can then be provided for considered discussion.

Controlling Money: The Federal Reserve and Its Critics

It is widely believed that the money stock of the United States, somehow defined, should play a central role in the conduct of Federal Reserve monetary policy. In particular, it is believed that the Federal Reserve should publicly announce a target time path for the money stock and then try to make the actual stock follow that path closely. The analytical basis for this approach to monetary policy, however, is seriously deficient. Debate seldom focuses on the important issues that are genuinely controversial; instead it becomes mired in confusion and spurious issues. This book analyzes three common sources on confusion about Federal Reserve policy: an inadequate comprehension of the differences among alternative operating procedures available to the Federal Reserve and the consequences of choosing one set of procedures rather than another, a tendency to ignore or deemphasize the importance of nonpolicy factors in determining month-to-month variations in the money stock, and a failure to understand the two-stage decision process implicit in the use of a target path for money as a surrogate for the ultimate targets of economic policy. For each of these areas, the book clarifies the fundamental facts and policy issues. Where controversy derives from misunderstanding, the analysis tries to foster a greater convergence of views. Where a convergence of views is not possible, the analysis brings points of disagreement into sharper focus. The conclusions of the analysis cannot accurately be called either monetarist or nonmonetarist. Thoughtful positions on important monetary policy issues-issues that are justifiably controversial-do not lend themselves to such labels. One purpose of this bookis to help put aside the older, no sterile controversies about monetarism versus Keynesianism and to promote constructive debate on the higher priority matters that genuinely command attention.

The Trouble With “Choice” in Childbirth

ABSTRACT: The alternatives or choices available in childbirth may not address parents' or caregivers' concerns about maternity care adequately because the choices offered are limited, and because parents are not really free to choose. Obstetric care is organized in ways that limit choices, being a hierarchical system dominated by an engineering model of birth, in which caregivers contact parents very briefly and are themselves interchangeable, where efficiency is paramount, and where the technology that has been adopted is confining rather than freeing. Safety is a spurious issue in limiting most choices. Several ways to increase choices in childbirth are discussed.

Computer education in a graduate school of management

Several years of experience have led to the belief that the creative design and evaluation of management information systems requires a thorough understanding of the related computer technology. Concepts such as paging and priority interrupt systems can best be explained at the machine language level. Any machine used for exposition should fulfill several criteria. It should: (1) raise as few spurious issues as possible; (2) allow, without undue effort, the solution of interesting problems; (3) be capable of exposing all outstanding issues of significance, within the chosen machine; (4) be useful for pursuing issues in great depth when appropriate; (5) not be committed to the equipment provided by any manufacturer; (6) be able to provide the student with diagnostic aids to a great depth; (7) allow the student ready access to the machine; (8) be capable of extension to expose new issues as they come along. We have constructed a simulated machine and its associated software which meets these criteria. This system, called the PRISM system, is documented by a primer and a reference manual.