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Age assessment of migrants is crucial, particularly for unaccompanied foreign minors, a population facing legal, social, and humanitarian challenges. Despite existing guidelines, there is no unified protocol in Europe for age assessment. The Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (FASE) conducted a comprehensive questionnaire to understand age estimation practices in Europe. The questionnaire had sections focusing on the professional background of respondents, annual assessment numbers, requesting parties and reasons, types of examinations conducted (e.g., physical, radiological), followed protocols, age estimation methods, and questions on how age estimates are reported. The questionnaire's findings reveal extensive engagement of the forensic community in age assessment in the living, emphasizing multidisciplinary approaches. However, there seems to be an incomplete appreciation of AGFAD guidelines. Commonalities exist in examination methodologies and imaging tests. However, discrepancies emerged among respondents regarding sexual maturity assessment and reporting assessment results. Given the increasing importance of age assessment, especially for migrant child protection, the study stresses the need for a unified protocol across European countries. This can only be achieved if EU Member States wholeheartedly embrace the fundamental principles outlined in EU Directives and conduct medical age assessments aligned with recognized standards such as the AGFAD guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of the first peoples to colonize the Caribbean Islands have been the subject of intense debate for over 30 years. Competing hypotheses have identified five separate migrations from the mainland with a separate debate concerning the colonization of The Bahamas. Significant differences in the facial morphology of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Hispaniola and Cuba led to the present study of Lucayan skulls from The Bahamas. The goal was to determine which group the native Lucayans more closely resembled to resolve this long-standing dispute. The results indicate that they are related to groups from Hispaniola and Jamaica and not to Cuban inhabitants. This study clarified the larger picture of Caribbean migrations and supports evidence for a Carib invasion of the Greater Antilles around AD 800. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new sorting algorithm that sorts input data elements without any comparison operations between the data—comparison-free sorting. Our algorithm’s time complexity is on the order of O(N) for both single- and multi-threaded CPU and many-core GPU implementations. Our results show speedups on average of 4.6 × , 4 × , and 3.5 × for single-threaded CPU, 8-threaded CPU, and many-threaded GPU implementations, respectively, for input sizes ranging from 27 to 230 elements as compared to common sorting algorithms for a wide variation of element distributions, ranging from all unique elements to a single repeated element. In addition, our proposed algorithm more efficiently utilizes the GPU architecture as compared to a multi-core CPU architecture, showing a speedup of approximately 4 × for input sizes ranging from 27 to 230 elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodologies that improve estimation of caliber from cranial bone defects are necessary to meet the ever increasing admissibility standards. The relationship between caliber, wound diameter, and bone mineral density (BMD) was examined. The formation of the permanent cavity is influenced by bullet yaw, velocity, distance, and tissue properties. The hypothesis was that including BMD, wound diameter could be explained by differences in caliber. The sample consists of 68 autopsy sections and 101 specimens from Phelps (1898). A subsample of 18 was scanned using dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) for BMD measurement to test whether an increase in BMD affects wound diameter. Pearson product-moment correlations of the subsample indicate the strongest correlation is between BMD and minimum diameter ( r = 0.7101), followed by a correlation between minimum diameter and caliber ( r = 0.6854). Despite the previous use of thickness as a proxy for BMD, no correlation was found between BMD and thickness ( r = 0.0143). A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) detected a significant influence of BMD and minimum diameter on caliber size (Prob > F = 0.0003). The logistic regression shows that caliber can be estimated from minimum diameter. Using the subsample, the results show that the inclusion of BMD strengthens the model for estimating caliber from entrance gunshot defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the number of cores in chip multi-processor systems increases, the contention over shared last-level cache (LLC) resources increases, thus making LLC optimization critical, especially for embedded systems with strict area/energy/power constraints. We propose cache partitioning with partial sharing (CaPPS), which reduces LLC contention using cache partitioning and improves utilization with sharing configuration. Sharing configuration enables the partitions to be privately allocated to a single core, partially shared with a subset of cores, or fully shared with all cores based on the co-executing applications' requirements. CaPPS imposes low hardware overhead and affords an extensive design space to increase optimization potential. To facilitate fast design space exploration, we develop an analytical model to quickly estimate the miss rates of all CaPPS configurations using the applications' isolated LLC access traces to predict runtime LLC contention. Experimental results demonstrate that the analytical model estimates cache miss rates with an average error of only 0.73 % and with an average speedup of $$3505\times $$ as compared to a cycle-accurate simulator. Due to CaPPS's extensive design space, CaPPS can reduce the average LLC miss rate by as much as 25 % as compared to baseline configurations and as much as 14-17 % as compared to prior works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sex estimation is extremely important in the analysis of human remains as many of the subsequent biological parameters are sex specific (e.g., age at death, stature, and ancestry). When dealing with incomplete or fragmented remains, metric analysis of the tarsal bones of the feet has proven valuable. In this study, the utility of 18 width, length, and height tarsal measurements were assessed for sex-related variation in a Portuguese sample. A total of 300 males and females from the Coimbra Identified Skeletal Collection were used to develop sex prediction models based on statistical and machine learning algorithm such as discriminant function analysis, logistic regression, classification trees, and artificial neural networks. All models were evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation and an independent test sample composed of 60 males and females from the Identified Skeletal Collection of the 21st Century. Results showed that tarsal bone sex-related variation can be easily captured with a high degree of repeatability. A simple tree-based multivariate algorithm involving measurements from the calcaneus, talus, first and third cuneiforms, and cuboid resulted in 88.3 % correct sex estimation both on training and independent test sets. Traditional statistical classifiers such as the discriminant function analysis were outperformed by machine learning techniques. Results obtained show that machine learning algorithm are an important tool the forensic practitioners should consider when developing new standards for sex estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child abuse encompasses four major forms of abuse: physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and neglect. The United States retains one of the worst records of child abuse in the industrialized world. It has also been determined that a large portion of these cases are missed and go undocumented in state and federal reporting agencies. In addition, disparate risk factors have been identified for physical abuse and neglect cases, but substance abuse has been found to be a significant factor in all forms of abuse. Fatal child maltreatment and neglect investigations require a multi-pronged and multidisciplinary approach requiring the coordination and information gathering from various agencies. A major difficulty in determining the accidental or non-accidental nature of these cases is that the account surrounding the events of the death of child is acquired from the caretaker. In this review, we outline common diagnostic characteristics and patterns of non-accidental injuries and neglect as a result of nutritional deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networked embedded systems typically leverage a collection of low-power embedded systems (nodes) to collaboratively execute applications spanning diverse application domains (e.g., video, image processing, communication, etc.) with diverse application requirements. The individual networked nodes must operate under stringent constraints (e.g., energy, memory, etc.) and should be specialized to meet varying applications' requirements in order to adhere to these constraints. Phase-based tuning specializes a system's tunable parameters to the varying runtime requirements of an application's different phases of execution to meet optimization goals. Since the design space for tunable systems can be very large, one of the major challenges in phase-based tuning is determining the best configuration for each phase without incurring significant tuning overhead (e.g., energy and/or performance) during design space exploration. In this paper, we propose phase distance mapping, which directly determines the best configuration for a phase, thereby eliminating design space exploration. Phase distance mapping applies the correlation between a known phase's characteristics and best configuration to determine a new phase's best configuration based on the new phase's characteristics. Experimental results verify that our phase distance mapping approach, when applied to cache tuning, determines cache configurations within 1 % of the optimal configurations on average and yields an energy delay product savings of 27 % on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological advancements in the silicon industry, as predicted by Moore’s law, have resulted in an increasing number of processor cores on a single chip, giving rise to multicore, and subsequently many-core architectures. This work focuses on identifying key architecture and software optimizations to attain high performance from tiled many-core architectures (TMAs)—an architectural innovation in the multicore technology. Although embedded systems design is traditionally power-centric, there has been a recent shift toward high-performance embedded computing due to the proliferation of compute-intensive embedded applications. The TMAs are suitable for these embedded applications due to low-power design features in many of these TMAs. We discuss the performance optimizations on a single tile (processor core) as well as parallel performance optimizations, such as application decomposition, cache locality, tile locality, memory balancing, and horizontal communication for TMAs. We elaborate compiler-based optimizations that are applicable to TMAs, such as function inlining, loop unrolling, and feedback-based optimizations. We present a case study with optimized dense matrix multiplication algorithms for Tilera’s TILEPro64 to experimentally demonstrate the performance and performance per watt optimizations on TMAs. Our results quantify the effectiveness of algorithmic choices, cache blocking, compiler optimizations, and horizontal communication in attaining high performance and performance per watt on TMAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As wireless sensor network platforms become increasingly more complex to design and optimize due to the multitude of interdependent parameters that must be considered, computer simulations have emerged as the primary solution to feasibly analyze the long-term effects of design changes within a deployed system. Although several successful wireless sensor network simulators have already been developed, to our knowledge, none provide the modularity necessary to model sensor nodes and/or environmental components at differing levels of abstraction. In this paper, we present the Arizona Transaction-Level Simulator for Sensor Networks (ATLeS-SN), which by virtue of its implementation language-SystemC-allows application developers to easily specify interchangeable component models in order to achieve the desired simulation correctness, performance, and scalability. We provide an overview of our proposed simulation framework and highlight its benefits using a sound ranging application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a scalable high-speed divide-by- N frequency divider using only basic digital CMOS circuits. The divider achieves high-speed operation using a novel parallel counter and a pipelined architecture. The parallel counter is based on a state look-ahead component in conjunction with an internal pipeline structure in order to simultaneously trigger all state value updates without a rippling effect. The pipeline latencies are precluded due to the use of a subtractor circuit that 'swallows' any additional cycles. Furthermore, our frequency divider is easily scalable to large divider widths due to the use of modular component architecture. The fan-in and fan-out are independent of the divider width, thus making the structure attractive for regular VLSI implementation and continued technology scaling. We implemented our proposed divider using a 0.15-μm TSMC digital cell library and achieved a maximum operating frequency of 2 GHz, an area of 112 848 μm (900 transistors), and consumed 15.47 mW of power operating at 2 GHz for an 8-bit design, which offers 252 different frequency divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordinate data analysis of ancient crania from the New World reveals complexity in interpretation when addressing ancient population dispersals. The results of this study generally support a geographic patterning for the New World; however, it also revealed a much more complex and multifactorial mechanism shaping craniofacial morphology that should be considered when investigating ecogeographic models for hominin dispersals. We show that craniofacial variation is not the result of a single mechanism but is a much more complex interaction of environmental and microevolutionary forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]