Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are standards compliant Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems feasible on RFID ?

With elliptic curve cryptography emerging as a serious alternative, the desired level of security can be attained with significantly smaller key sizes. This makes ECC very attractive for small-footprint devices with limited computational capability, memory and low-bandwidth network connections. However ECC is still considered to be impracticable for very low-end constrained devices like sensor networks and RFID tags. We present a stand-alone highly area optimized ECC processor design for standards compliant binary field curves. We use the fast squarer implementation to construct an addition chain that allows inversion to be computed efficiently. Hence, we propose an affine co-ordinate ASIC implementation of the ECC processor using a modified Montgomery point multiplication method for binary curves ranging from 113−193 bits. An area between 10k and 18k gates on a 0.35um CMOS process is possible for the different curves which makes the design very attractive for enabling ECC in constrained devices.
The Neural Basis of Following Advice

Learning by following explicit advice is fundamental for human cultural evolution, yet the neurobiology of adaptive social learning is largely unknown. Here, we used simulations to analyze the adaptive value of social learning mechanisms, computational modeling of behavioral data to describe cognitive mechanisms involved in social learning, and model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the neurobiological basis of following advice. One-time advice received before learning had a sustained influence on people's learning processes. This was best explained by social learning mechanisms implementing a more positive evaluation of the outcomes from recommended options. Computer simulations showed that this “outcome-bonus” accumulates more rewards than an alternative mechanism implementing higher initial reward expectation for recommended options. fMRI results revealed a neural outcome-bonus signal in the septal area and the left caudate. This neural signal coded rewards in the absence of advice, and crucially, it signaled greater positive rewards for positive and negative feedback after recommended rather than after non-recommended choices. Hence, our results indicate that following advice is intrinsically rewarding. A positive correlation between the model's outcome-bonus parameter and amygdala activity after positive feedback directly relates the computational model to brain activity. These results advance the understanding of social learning by providing a neurobiological account for adaptive learning from advice.
Dust emission from the lensed Lyman break galaxy cB58

We detect 1.2mm continuum emission from dust in the gravitationally lensed Lyman break galaxy MS 1512+36-cB58. Our detected flux is surprisingly low: relative to local starburst galaxies, cB58 appears to produce somewhat less far-IR emission than its UV reddening predicts. After comparing several different estimates of the source's dust content, we conclude that the apparent discrepancy is most likely related to uncertainty in its UV spectral slope. Alternate scenarios to account for a far-IR "deficit" which rely on a high dust temperature or differential magnification are less satisfactory. Our result underscores one of the risks inherent in characterizing the cosmic star formation history from rest-UV data alone.
On the Positive Side of Avoidance Motivation: An Increase in Avoidance Motivation Reduces Procrastination among Students

People who procrastinate often pay a heavy price in terms of illness, stress, and poor performance. Because procrastination has harmful consequences, we predicted that avoidance motivation, a self-regulation system that protects people from harm, would also protect them against procrastination. We hypothesised that avoidance motivation reduces procrastination, despite the known destructive effects avoidance motivation has on thriving. In Study 1, students high in chronic-avoidance motivation had the lowest dropout rates from a bonusgranting longitudinal study. In Study 2, avoidance motivation was negatively related to delay in submitting a term paper, when controlling for chronic procrastination, self-efficacy, impulsiveness, and age. In Study 3, an experimental manipulation of avoidance motivation reduced procrastination three times, but only once significantly. In Study 4, manipulations of both avoidance motivation and approach motivation, relative to a control motivation, using a within-subjects design, indicated that the avoidance manipulation reduced procrastination in submitting subsequent reading reports, whereas the approach manipulation did not. We subjected all our results to a meta-analysis that indicated that avoidance motivation had a significant preventive effect on procrastination. We conclude that avoidance motivation can reduce procrastination, and suggest that our avoidance-manipulation techniques could be applied across a variety of organisational and educational settings.
Non-binary youth: Access to gender-affirming primary health care

ABSTRACT Background: Transgender (trans) youth who identify outside the gender binary are a growing subpopulation. In this article, we document differences in access to gender-affirming health care between binary and non-binary identified trans youth and explore ways of meeting the health needs of non-binary youth within primary care settings. Methods: The Canadian Trans Youth Health Survey is a national online survey of trans youth, 14–25 years, conducted in 2013–2014. Among the 839 participants who responded to gender identity items in the survey, 41% identified as non-binary. We compared demographic, health outcome, and health care access responses between non-binary and binary (trans girls/women and trans boys/men) youth. Results: Non-binary and binary youth were similar in most demographics, including age, geographic distribution, and ethnocultural backgrounds, however a larger proportion (82%) of non-binary youth were assigned female at birth. Older non-binary youth (aged 19–25) were significantly more likely to forego needed healthcare than older binary youth; no significant differences were found between younger (14–18) non-binary and binary youth in foregoing healthcare. Overall, non-binary youth (13%) were significantly less likely than binary youth (52%) to access hormone therapy, but they were more likely than binary youth to report experiencing barriers to accessing hormone therapy when needed. Conclusions: Non-binary trans youth in Canada report challenges in accessing needed gender-affirming healthcare. Primary care providers are well-situated to integrate a broad range of gender-affirming care services into practice in order to address the unique needs of non-binary youth. Future research is warranted to explore experiences of non-binary youth related to barriers to care and to explore how services can be designed and delivered to better meet the needs of non-binary youth seeking gender-affirming primary care.
Withstanding our Status as Outsiders-Within: Professional Counterspaces for African American Women Student Affairs Administrators

Although engagement in social and academic counterspaces has been studied as a strategy used by African American college students to withstand racially inhospitable campus climates, very little research documents the impact of professional counterspaces on African American women student affairs administrators. The purpose of this basic interpretive qualitative study was to explore how consistently participating in the African American Women’s Summit (AAWS), a professional development program in the United States designed by and for African American women student affairs administrators (i.e., a professional counterspace), assisted these women working at PWIs to withstand their status as outsiders-within. Findings revealed three primary ways participants benefited from participating in the AAWS: identification and validation of oppressive experiences, dissemination of strategies to resist oppressions, and fortification of African American women’s standpoint. Based upon the findings of this study, it can be presumed that African American women in higher education may be better equipped to identify (and thus better prepared to respond to) microaggressive incidents, find greater access to survival and success strategies, and develop a healthier standpoint when engaged in culturally homogenous professional counterspaces that are developed by and for themselves.
D4 Dopamine Receptor-Mediated Modulation of Hippocampal Synaptic Efficacy and Network Activity in Behaving Mice

Dopamine (DA) is the predominant catecholamine neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain, where DA governs a variety of functions including locomotor activity, cognition, emotion, synaptic plasticity, learning and memory formation. In the hippocampus, activation of D1/5 receptors (D1/5Rs) is known to stabilize memory formation and late, protein-dependent long-term potentiation (LTP) in the stratum radiatum (RAD), whereas activation of D4 receptors (D4Rs) inhibits early LTP in the stratum oriens (OR) and depotentiates LTP in RAD. Interestingly, novelty exploration rescues memory impairment caused by blockade of D1/5Rs in the hippocampus. However, the function of D4Rs in synaptic plasticity, neural network activity and memory-associated behaviors remained to be elucidated in vivo. I implanted two recording electrodes targeting OR and RAD together with a bipolar stimulation electrode placed either in OR or RAD while monitoring depth profiles of stimulus-evoked local field potentials (eLFPs). At least one week later, eLFPs and spontaneous oscillatory activities (sLFPs) were recorded in the hippocampus of freely behaving mice to investigate the role of D4Rs under physiological condition. My results show that systemic, intraperitoneal treatment with the D4R agonist PD 168077 (PD) slightly decreased eLFPs both in OR and RAD and in parallel increased the paired-pulse ratio (PPR) between two eLFPs, indicating presynaptic mechanisms were involved in this modulation. PD treatment postponed the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and, during REM onset, the theta peak frequency was shifted to lower band, the gamma band power was reduced and the strength of theta-gamma coupling was attenuated. Furthermore, D4R agonist treatment impaired late LTP (4 hours) both in OR and RAD, while early LTP (30 min) was reduced only in OR. When mice were transferred from their home cage to a fear box, band power of fast gamma increased in that novel environment, in particular after receiving an electric footshock on day 1 and during context exposure on day 2, and these increases persisted when the mice were returned to home cage immediately after. These changing patterns of oscillatory activities were not affected by PD treatment, and therefore the D4R-mediated layer-specific modulation of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus is unlikely implicated in learning and memory during novelty exploration or fear conditioning.
Rate-adaptive multimedia multicasting over IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

Multimedia services are a major application for IEEE 802.11 WLANs but the current standard does not utilize any rate adaptation technique for multicasting. SARM (SNR- based auto rate for multicast) is a new rate adaptation mechanism for multicasting multimedia content in IEEE 802.11 WLAN environments. Since there is no RTS/CTS or MAC ACK frame in multicast packet transmissions, SARM uses an auxiliary signaling method to obtain the channel quality for each mobile node. By adapting a transmission rate based on the SNR of the node experiencing the worst air-channel, SARM achieves the best quality of service for the prevailing conditions. This reduces the proportion of wireless channel resources assigned to multicasting, allowing more bandwidth for unicast flows.
A Social Heuristics Hypothesis for the Stag Hunt: Fast- and Slow-Thinking Hunters in the Lab

In this paper, we analyze the role of intuitive versus deliberative thinking in stag hunt games. To do so we, first, provide a conceptual framework predicting that, under the assumption that stag is the ruling social convention in real life interactions, players who make their choices fast and intuitively, relying on social heuristics, choose stag more often than other players. Second, we run a lab experiment and use a time pressure treatment to induce fast and intuitive thinking. We find that: (i) players under the time pressure treatment are more likely to choose stag than individuals in the control group; (ii) individual choices under the time pressure treatment are less sensitive to the size of the basin of attraction of stag; (iii) these results are largely driven by less experienced participants. Overall, our findings provide support to the Social Heuristics Hypothesis (Rand et al., 2012) applied to stag hunt interactions.
Context-sensitive word distance by adaptive scaling of a semantic space

This paper proposes a computationally feasible method for measuring the context-sensitive semantic distance between words. The distance is computed by adaptive scaling of a semantic space. In the semantic space, each word in the vocabulary V is represented by a multidimensional vector which is extracted from an English dictionary through principal component analysis. Given a word set C which speci es a context, each dimension of the semantic space is scaled up or down according to the distribution of C in the semantic space. In the space thus transformed, the distance between words in V becomes dependent on the context C. An evaluation through a word prediction task shows that the proposed measurement successfully extracts the context of a text.
Gradient Descent with Proximal Average for Nonconvex and Composite Regularization

Sparse modeling has been highly successful in many real-world applications. While a lot of interests have been on convex regularization, recent studies show that nonconvexregularizers can outperform their convex counterparts in many situations.However, the resulting nonconvex optimization problems are often challenging, especiallyfor composite regularizers such as the nonconvex overlapping group lasso. In thispaper, byusing a recent mathematical tool known as the proximal average,we propose a novel proximal gradient descent method for optimization with a wide class of nonconvex and composite regularizers.Instead of directlysolving the proximal stepassociated with a composite regularizer, we average thesolutions from the proximal problems of the constituent regularizers. This simple strategy has guaranteed convergenceand low per-iteration complexity.Experimental results on a number of synthetic andreal-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of theproposed optimization algorithm, and also the improved classification performanceresulting from thenonconvex regularizers.
Aldosterone Inhibits the Fetal Program and Increases Hypertrophy in the Heart of Hypertensive Mice

Background Arterial hypertension (AH) induces cardiac hypertrophy and reactivation of “fetal” gene expression. In rodent heart, alpha-Myosin Heavy Chain (MyHC) and its micro-RNA miR-208a regulate the expression of beta-MyHC and of its intronic miR-208b. However, the role of aldosterone in these processes remains unclear. Methodology/Principal Findings RT-PCR and western-blot were used to investigate the genes modulated by arterial hypertension and cardiac hyperaldosteronism. We developed a model of double-transgenic mice (AS-Ren) with cardiac hyperaldosteronism (AS mice) and systemic hypertension (Ren). AS-Ren mice had increased (x2) angiotensin II in plasma and increased (x2) aldosterone in heart. Ren and AS-Ren mice had a robust and similar hypertension (+70%) versus their controls. Anatomical data and echocardiography showed a worsening of cardiac hypertrophy (+41%) in AS-Ren mice (P<0.05 vs Ren). The increase of ANP (x 2.5; P<0.01) mRNA observed in Ren mice was blunted in AS-Ren mice. This non-induction of antitrophic natriuretic peptides may be involved in the higher trophic cardiac response in AS-Ren mice, as indicated by the markedly reduced cardiac hypertrophy in ANP-infused AS-Ren mice for one month. Besides, the AH-induced increase of ßMyHC and its intronic miRNA-208b was prevented in AS-Ren. The inhibition of miR 208a (−75%, p<0.001) in AS-Ren mice compared to AS was associated with increased Sox 6 mRNA (x 1.34; p<0.05), an inhibitor of ßMyHC transcription. Eplerenone prevented all aldosterone-dependent effects. Conclusions/Significance Our results indicate that increased aldosterone in heart inhibits the induction of atrial natriuretic peptide expression, via the mineralocorticoid receptor. This worsens cardiac hypertrophy without changing blood pressure. Moreover, this work reveals an original aldosterone-dependent inhibition of miR-208a in hypertension, resulting in the inhibition of β-myosin heavy chain expression through the induction of its transcriptional repressor Sox6. Thus, aldosterone inhibits the fetal program and increases cardiac hypertrophy in hypertensive mice.
Cryptographic Protocols for Enforcing Relationship-Based Access Control Policies

Relationship-based access control schemes have been studied to protect users' privacy in online social networks. In this paper, we propose cryptographic protocols for decentralized social networks to enforce relationship-based access control polices, i.e., K-common friends and k-depth. Our protocols are mainly built on pairing-based cryptosystems. We prove their security under the honest but curious adversary model, and we analyze their computation and communication complexities. Furthermore, we evaluate their efficiency through simulations on a real social network dataset.
The impact of tariff removal on poverty in Zimbabwe: A computable general equilibrium microsimulation

Abstract The paper uses a microsimulation computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to study the impact on poverty of a complete removal of tariffs in Zimbabwe. The model incorporates 14,006 households derived from the 1995 Poverty Assessment Study Survey. This paper's novelty is that it is one among a small group of papers that incorporates individual households in the CGE model as opposed to having representative households. Using individual households allows for a comprehensive analysis of poverty. The complete removal of tariffs favours exporting sectors. Poverty falls in the economy while inequality hardly changes. The results differ between rural and urban areas.
Hispanic concentration and the conditional influence of collective efficacy on adolescent childbearing.

OBJECTIVE To determine how Hispanic residential concentration moderates the relationship between neighborhood collective efficacy and teenage birth rates. DESIGN Cross-sectional analysis of census tract level survey data and birth records. SETTING Sixty-five Los Angeles (California) County census tracts in 2000 and 2001. PARTICIPANTS Measures of neighborhood collective efficacy from 2600 adults from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study (LAFANS) survey were linked with demographic information from the US 2000 Census and Los Angeles County birth records for 10- through 19-year-old mothers. MAIN EXPOSURES Collective efficacy and Hispanic residential concentration. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Married and unmarried teenage birth rates. RESULTS In census tracts with less than a 50% Hispanic population, a 1-SD increase in collective efficacy was associated with a 5.07 births per 1000 decrease in the unmarried teenage birth rate (P<.05). In census tracts with a 50% or greater Hispanic population, a 1-SD increase in collective efficacy was not statistically related to unmarried rates, but it was associated with a 3.43 increase in the married teenage birth rate (P<.05). CONCLUSIONS Collective efficacy may help reduce adolescent childbearing in some, but not all, neighborhoods. An interaction between collective efficacy and Hispanic population concentration suggests cultural variation may play a role in how collective efficacy influences adolescent fertility. Possible explanations for the positive relationship between collective efficacy and married birth rates found in segregated Hispanic neighborhoods include profertility orientations and availability of childrearing networks for young parents. To help harness social capital to improve public health outcome, we suggest future studies examine the role of community cultural variation.
Occupational Stress & Compassion Fatigue: The effects on workers in animal-related occupations

s which initially appeared relevant were imported for later assessment of suitability. Each complete paper was sourced for review, read in full by the first author (RS), and subsequently reviewed by the other authors (DM and HK). Articles were excluded if they related to human health caregivers or if they described occupational stress or compassion fatigue but did not include any formal evaluations. Studies were excluded if they addressed an unrelated subject or focused on management strategies or coping mechanisms. There were no publication date restrictions placed on the search. Because of the variability of study designs (quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods) a valid assessment of bias could not be conducted.
Revisiting Natural Gradient for Deep Networks

We evaluate natural gradient, an algorithm originally proposed in Amari (1997), for learning deep models. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We show the connection between natural gradient and three other recently proposed methods for training deep models: Hessian-Free (Martens, 2010), Krylov Subspace Descent (Vinyals and Povey, 2012) and TONGA (Le Roux et al., 2008). We describe how one can use unlabeled data to improve the generalization error obtained by natural gradient and empirically evaluate the robustness of the algorithm to the ordering of the training set compared to stochastic gradient descent. Finally we extend natural gradient to incorporate second order information alongside the manifold information and provide a benchmark of the new algorithm using a truncated Newton approach for inverting the metric matrix instead of using a diagonal approximation of it.
Pragmatics and the Lexicon

This contribution investigates the interactions between the (mental) lexicon and pragmatics. It aims to give an overview about pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, effects of negative strengthening, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenomena, the interpretation of compounds, and many phenomena presently discussed within the framework of Cognitive Semantics. After emphasizing some important consequences of the traditional view of lexical semantics—the contrastive analysis of lexemes within the Katz-Fodor tradition of semantics—several phenomena are collected that seem to conflict with its theoretical settings. These phenomena are taken as arguments in favor of a particular account of the division of labor between lexical semantics and pragmatics. This account combines the idea of (radical) semantic underspecification in the lexicon with a theory of pragmatic strengthening, based on conversational implicatures. The basic pragmatic mechanism can be expressed within the framework of (bidirectional) optimality theory for interpretation. It is argued that this approach may provide a principled account of several of the lexical-pragmatic phenomena that are currently discussed.