Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How Does Your Password Measure Up? The Effect of Strength Meters on Password Creation

To help users create stronger text-based passwords, many web sites have deployed password meters that provide visual feedback on password strength. Although these meters are in wide use, their effects on the security and usability of passwords have not been well studied. We present a 2,931-subject study of password creation in the presence of 14 password meters. We found that meters with a variety of visual appearances led users to create longer passwords. However, significant increases in resistance to a password-cracking algorithm were only achieved using meters that scored passwords stringently. These stringent meters also led participants to include more digits, symbols, and uppercase letters. Password meters also affected the act of password creation. Participants who saw stringent meters spent longer creating their password and were more likely to change their password while entering it, yet they were also more likely to find the password meter annoying. However, the most stringent meter and those without visual bars caused participants to place less importance on satisfying the meter. Participants who saw more lenient meters tried to fill the meter and were averse to choosing passwords a meter deemed "bad" or "poor. " Our findings can serve as guidelines for administrators seeking to nudge users towards stronger passwords.
Opposing roles of H3- and H4-acetylation in the regulation of nucleosome structure—a FRET study

Using FRET in bulk and on single molecules, we assessed the structural role of histone acetylation in nucleosomes reconstituted on the 170 bp long Widom 601 sequence. We followed salt-induced nucleosome disassembly, using donor–acceptor pairs on the ends or in the internal part of the nucleosomal DNA, and on H2B histone for measuring H2A/H2B dimer exchange. This allowed us to distinguish the influence of acetylation on salt-induced DNA unwrapping at the entry–exit site from its effect on nucleosome core dissociation. The effect of lysine acetylation is not simply cumulative, but showed distinct histone-specificity. Both H3- and H4-acetylation enhance DNA unwrapping above physiological ionic strength; however, while H3-acetylation renders the nucleosome core more sensitive to salt-induced dissociation and to dimer exchange, H4-acetylation counteracts these effects. Thus, our data suggest, that H3- and H4-acetylation have partially opposing roles in regulating nucleosome architecture and that distinct aspects of nucleosome dynamics might be independently controlled by individual histones.
Glasses have two lenses: the use of an acronymous metacognitive learning strategy to improve reading comprehension on the Internet

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii TABLE OF CONTENTS . iv LIST OF TABLES . vii LIST OF FIGURES . viii CHAPTER 1 RATIONALE AND OVERVIEW . 1 Rationale . 2 Overview. 6 Summary . 8 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW: GLASSES HAVE TWO LENSES . 10 Reading Comprehension and Print-Based Text . 12 The Consumer‟s Lens: How do I Understand This? 12 Reading Comprehension and Narrative Text. 12 Strategy Instruction . 16 Cognitive strategies . 17 Metacognition . 19 Scaffolding Learning: Putting our Understanding of Reading Comprehension to Use . 27 The use of learning strategies to scaffold comprehension development. 28 Acronymous learning strategies. 40 The Producer‟s Lens: How do I Make this Understandable? 45 Reading Comprehension and Expository Text . 46 Textual Readability, a First Step in Matching the Product to the Consumer . 49 Other Features . 52 Reading Comprehension and Web-Based Text . 54 The Producer‟s Lens: How do I Make this Understandable? 55 Reading Comprehension and Web-Text . 56 Textual Readability . 59 Usability of Web-Text, Matching the Product to the Consumer . 65 The Consumer‟s Lens: How do I Understand This? 74 Web Literacy . 74 Cognitive Strategies, Matching the Consumer to the Product . 78 Scaffolding Learning: Putting our Understanding of Reading Comprehension to Use . 80 Reading With a Purpose, or Reading Purposefully? 83 Towards Evidence Based Practice . 83 Summary . 89 CHAPTER 3 METHODS AND PROCEDURES . 91 Research Context . 92 Location . 92 Participants . 92 Original study . 92 Replication study . 93 Curriculum . 94 Procedures. 95 The Original Study . 95 The Replication Study . 97 Instrumentation . 98
Layer Normalization

Training state-of-the-art, deep neural networks is computationally expensive. One way to reduce the training time is to normalize the activities of the neurons. A recently introduced technique called batch normalization uses the distribution of the summed input to a neuron over a mini-batch of training cases to compute a mean and variance which are then used to normalize the summed input to that neuron on each training case. This significantly reduces the training time in feed-forward neural networks. However, the effect of batch normalization is dependent on the mini-batch size and it is not obvious how to apply it to recurrent neural networks. In this paper, we transpose batch normalization into layer normalization by computing the mean and variance used for normalization from all of the summed inputs to the neurons in a layer on a single training case. Like batch normalization, we also give each neuron its own adaptive bias and gain which are applied after the normalization but before the non-linearity. Unlike batch normalization, layer normalization performs exactly the same computation at training and test times. It is also straightforward to apply to recurrent neural networks by computing the normalization statistics separately at each time step. Layer normalization is very effective at stabilizing the hidden state dynamics in recurrent networks. Empirically, we show that layer normalization can substantially reduce the training time compared with previously published techniques.
AANN-HMM models for speaker verification and speech recognition

Pattern classification is an important task in speech recognition and speaker verification. Given the feature vectors of an input the goal is to capture the characteristics of these features unique to each class. This paper deals with exploring Auto Associative Neural Network (AANN) models for the task of speaker verification and speech recognition. We show that AANN models produce comparable performance with that of GMM based speaker verification and speech recognition.
Sex-Specific Effects of High Fat Diet on Indices of Metabolic Syndrome in 3xTg-AD Mice: Implications for Alzheimer's Disease

Multiple factors of metabolic syndrome have been implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), including abdominal obesity, insulin resistance, endocrine dysfunction and dyslipidemia. High fat diet, a common experimental model of obesity and metabolic syndrome, has been shown to accelerate cognitive decline and AD-related neuropathology in animal models. However, sex interacts with the metabolic outcomes of high fat diet and, therefore, may alter neuropathological consequences of dietary manipulations. This study examines the effects of sex and high fat diet on metabolic and AD-related neuropathological outcomes in 3xTg-AD mice. Three month-old male and female 3xTg-AD mice were fed either standard or high fat diets for 4 months. Obesity was observed in all high fat fed mice; however, ectopic fat accumulation, hyperglycemia and hyperinsulinemia were observed only in males. Interestingly, despite the different metabolic outcomes of high fat diet, the neuropathological consequences were similar: both male and female mice maintained under high fat diet exhibited significant worsening in behavioral performance and hippocampal accumulation of β-amyloid protein. Because high fat diet resulted in obesity and increased AD-like pathology in both sexes, these data support a role of obesity-related factors in promoting AD pathogenesis.
Optimal allocation of packet-level and byte-level FEC in video multicasting over wired and wireless networks

Multicast is an efficient technique to deliver video content over a network. We consider such a multicast system to serve both wireless and wireline users when there are errors over the wired network and the wireless hop. Since packets are likely to be dropped in the wired networks while bit errors are more likely over the wireless hop, a combination of both packet-level and byte-level FEC is required to recover these errors. Given the estimated error and bandwidth characteristics reported by end users, the server needs to allocate optimally the packet-level and byte-level FEC to achieve maximum video quality. We study two schemes pertaining to whether or not the wireless gateway is able to transcode the video packets from the wired network before forwarding them to the wireless users. We first develop a model to analyze the system; and then propose an efficient algorithm for the FEC computation. We finally compare the schemes in terms of the optimal parameters used in the FEC, and the video quality achieved.
High end complexity

Despite the general recognition of complexity as an important concept and decades of work, very little progress has been made in the attempt to define complexity. It is suggested that this is due to the fact that the definition of complex behaviour is itself complex, forming a scale from the simple to the more and more complex. Those systems at the high end of the scale are not at present well modelled, and reasons why this might be the case are presented. The possibility that quantum theories may be able to model such high end complexity is investigated.
Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions, including the complete text of The Corded Shell

"The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression", published in 1980 and now out of print, was concerned with the question of how music comes to have the emotional properties that have been perceived in it and ascribed to it since antiquity. In that book, Peter Kivy argued that music possesses expressive properties, not as powers to arouse emotions in us but, rather, as perceived qualities of the music itself. In "Sound Sentiment", he augments his previous work with four entirely new chapters. Incorporating the complete, corrected text of "The Corded Shell", Kivy brings his earlier arguments up to date in light of recent work in the field, and discusses and answers various criticisms. Author note: Peter Kivy is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and Associate Editor of the "Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism". He received the Deems Taylor Award of ASCAP for "The Corded Shell".
Observations of the diurnal cycle of outgoing longwave radiation from the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget instrument

The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget instrument on Meteosat‐8, located over Africa, provides unprecedented temporal sampling (∼17 minutes) of the broadband emitted thermal and reflected solar radiances. We analyse the diurnal cycle of the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) fluxes derived from the thermal radiances for July 2006. Principal component (PC) analysis separates the signals of the surface temperature response to solar heating and of the development of convective clouds. The first two PCs explain most of the OLR variations: PC1 (surface heating) explains 82.3% of the total variance and PC2 (cloud development) explains 12.8% of the variance. Convection is initiated preferentially over mountainous regions and the cloud then advects downstream in the ambient flow. Diurnal variations are much weaker over the oceans, but a coherent signal over the Gulf of Guinea suggests that the cloudiness is modulated by the diurnally varying contrast between the Gulf and the adjacent land mass.
Osmoreceptors do not exhibit a sex‐dependent modulation of forearm skin blood flow and sweating

Studies show that increases in plasma osmolality result in a delayed onset threshold of thermoeffector responses. However, it remains unclear if there are sex‐related differences in the osmotically induced changes in both sweating and cutaneous vascular conductance (CVC). Nine young men and nine young women were passively heated (water‐perfused suit) to 1.5°C above baseline esophageal temperature while in an isosmotic (0.9% NaCl saline infusion) (ISO) and hyperosmotic (3% NaCl saline infusion) (HYP) state. Forearm sweat rate (ventilated capsule), skin blood flow (laser‐Doppler), esophageal temperature and skin temperature were continuously recorded. Sweat gland output (SGO) on the forearm was calculated from the number of heat activated sweat glands (modified iodine‐paper technique) at the end of heating. The onset threshold and thermosensitivity of sweating and CVC were determined using the linear portion of each response plotted against mean body temperature and analyzed using segmented regression analysis. We show that the osmotically induced delay in the onset threshold of sweating and CVC is similar between males and females. Although the thermosensitivity of CVC was similar between sexes (P = 0.601), the thermosensitivity of sweating was consistently lower in females compared to males (P = 0.018). The lower thermosensitivity in sudomotor response of females was accompanied by a lower SGO (P = 0.003), albeit similar sweat gland activation to males (P = 0.644). We conclude that sex‐related differences in thermoeffector activity are independent of osmoreceptor activation. Therefore, osmoreceptors do not exhibit sex‐related differences in the modulation of CVC and sweating responses during heat stress.
Stratospheric water vapor predicted from the Lagrangian temperature history of air entering the stratosphere in the tropics

[1] We present results of Lagrangian troposphere-to-stratosphere transport (TST) in the tropics based on trajectory calculations for the period 1979–2001. The trajectories and corresponding temperature histories are calculated from wind and temperature fields provided by the reanalysis data ERA-40 of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The water vapor mixing ratio of air entering the tropical stratosphere is calculated from the minimum saturation mixing ratio over ice encountered by each trajectory. We show that this Lagrangian approach, which considers the global-scale to synoptic-scale dynamics of tropical TST but neglects mesoscale dynamics and details of cloud microphysics, substantially improves estimates of stratospheric humidity compared to calculations based on Eulerian mean tropical tropopause temperatures. For the period 1979–2001 we estimate from the Lagrangian calculation that the mean water mixing ratio of air entering the stratosphere is 3.5 ppmv, which is in good agreement with measurements during the same period, ranging from 3.3 ppmv to 4 ppmv, whereas an estimate based on an Eulerian mean calculation is about 6 ppmv. The amplitude of the annual cycle in water vapor mixing ratio at a potential temperature of 400 K in the tropics estimated from the Lagrangian calculation is compared with measurements of water vapor from the Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE). For the period 1992–2001, when HALOE measurements and ERA-40 data overlap, we calculate a peak-to-peak amplitude of ∼1.7 ppmv, in good agreement with ∼1.6 ppmv seen in HALOE data. On average, the Lagrangian calculations have a moist bias of ∼0.2 ppmv, equivalent to a warm bias of the Lagrangian cold point of about 0.5 K. We conclude that the Lagrangian calculation based on synoptic-scale velocity and temperature fields yields estimates for stratospheric water vapor in good agreement with observations and that mesoscale and cloud microphysical processes need not be invoked, at first order, to explain annual mean and seasonal variation of water vapor mixing ratios in the tropical lower stratosphere.
Dose and developmental responses of Anopheles merus larvae to salinity

SUMMARY Saltwater tolerance is a trait that carries both ecological and epidemiological significance for Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit human malaria, as it plays a key role in determining their habitat use and ecological distribution, and thus their local contribution to malaria transmission. Here, we lay the groundwork for genetic dissection of this trait by quantifying saltwater tolerance in three closely related cryptic species and malaria vectors from the Afrotropical Anopheles gambiae complex that are known to differ starkly in their tolerance to salinity: the obligate freshwater species A. gambiae and A. coluzzii, and the saltwater-tolerant species A. merus. We performed detailed comparisons of survivorship under varying salinities, using multiple strains of A. gambiae, A. coluzzii and A. merus, as well as F1 progeny from reciprocal crosses of A. merus and A. coluzzii. Additionally, using immunohistochemistry, we compared the location of three ion regulatory proteins (Na+/K+-ATPase, carbonic anhydrase and Na+/H+-antiporter) in the recta of A. coluzzii and A. merus reared in freshwater or saline water. As expected, we found that A. merus survives exposure to high salinities better than A. gambiae and A. coluzzii. Further, we found that exposure to a salinity level of 15.85 g NaCl l−1 is a discriminating dose that kills all A. gambiae, A. coluzzii and A. coluzzii–A. merus F1 larvae, but does not negatively impact the survival of A. merus. Importantly, phenotypic expression of saltwater tolerance by A. merus is highly dependent upon the developmental time of exposure, and based on immunohistochemistry, salt tolerance appears to involve a major shift in Na+/K+-ATPase localization in the rectum, as observed previously for the distantly related saline-tolerant species A. albimanus.
A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of a Four-Factor Model of Attitudes toward Computers: A Study of Preservice Teachers

AbstractBased on previous research, a four-factor model of attitudes towards computers is proposed: (a) sex differences, (b) comfort, (c) liking, and (d) value. Employing 401 education undergraduates as subjects, a confirmatory factor analysis was carried out. The results suggested that the data produce a satisfactory fit to the model with a Goodness of Fit Index of 0.844 and a Root Mean Square Residual of 0.061. A large proportion of the variance (82%) in the data was explained by the four-factor model. The implications of these findings for further research into computer attitudes are discussed.
Connectionist reinforcement learning for intelligent unit micro management in StarCraft

Real Time Strategy Games are one of the most popular game schemes in PC markets and offer a dynamic environment that involves several interacting agents. The core strategies that need to be developed in these games are unit micro management, building order, resource management, and the game main tactic. Unfortunately, current games only use scripted and fixed behaviors for their artificial intelligence (AI), and the player can easily learn the counter measures to defeat the AI. In this paper, we describe a system based on neural networks that controls a set of units of the same type in the popular game StarCraft. Using the neural networks, the units will either choose a unit to attack or evade from the battlefield. The system uses reinforcement learning combined with neural networks using online Sarsa and neural-fitted Sarsa, both with a short term memory reward function. We also present an incremental learning method for training the units for larger scenarios involving more units using trained neural networks on smaller scenarios. Additionally, we developed a novel sensing system to feed the environment data to the neural networks using separate vision grids. The simulation results show superior performance against the human-made AI scripts in StarCraft.
Cytomorphologic manifestations of Alzheimer's disease using brain squash smears: An autopsy study with histology–cytology correlation

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. The cardinal histopathologic features include senile plaques (SPs) and neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), and in addition, granulovacuolar degeneration (GVD) and Hirano bodies (HBs) are frequently observed in the hippocampus. We studied hippocampal cytological features of AD, compared with controls. Hippocampal squash smears were prepared from 26 autopsy brains and stained with three different solutions, including Papanicolaou stain (Pap‐s). The smears were evaluated for the aforementioned four structures and gliosis, and their frequency was compared between AD (n = 15) and control (n = 11) groups. Hippocampal smears of all AD cases revealed NFTs and gliosis. NFTs were light gray with thick flame‐like structures on Pap‐s. GVD was identified in the majority of AD cases and was most easily observed on Pap‐s. SPs were difficult to identify and were seen only in AD cases. HBs were rarely identified as long light eosinophilic hyaline structures on Pap‐s. Cytological findings of hippocampi reflect the characteristic histological features of AD with the exception of HBs, which are difficult to identify on smears. NFTs and gliosis, and SPs seem to be sensitive and specific cytologic markers in hippocampal smears for AD, respectively. Diagn. Cytopathol. 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Application of the Active Element Pattern Method for Calculation of the Scattering Pattern of Large Finite Arrays

This letter extends the concept of the active element pattern method that is used to solve the array radiation problem when scattered fields of large finite arrays are calculated. We name this method the original induced element pattern method (OIEPM). The theoretical derivation of the method is presented. In addition, to overcome the limitation and simplify the operation of the OIEPM, an improved induced element pattern method (IIEPM) is proposed, which transforms the large array calculation problem into two small array problems. Unlike the OIEPM that requires calculation of the induced element pattern (IEP) of all the elements of the subarray, the IIEPM merely needs to calculate the fully scattered field of two small arrays. Meanwhile, the effects of the mutual coupling between elements and the edge diffraction are rigorously taken into account. Compared to other numerical and active (or induced) element pattern methods, the IIEPM can greatly reduce the computational cost and simplify the operational procedure. Examples of microstrip patch antenna arrays are analyzed to assess the accuracy and generality of the IIEPM. Numerical examples show that the scattering patterns calculated by the IIEPM and those simulated by the HFSS are in good agreement.
Association analysis of candidate gene polymorphisms with egg production in Japanese quails ( Coturnix japonica )

This study was conducted to identify genotypes and evaluate the effect of polymorphisms in growth hormone (GH), prolactin (PRL), bone morphogenetic protein receptor-Type IB (BMPR-1B) and melatonin receptor-type 1C (MTNR-1C) genes on egg production of Japanese quail during 20 weeks of egg laying. PCR-RFLP and PCR-SSCP methods were used to determine the genotype of all genes. Our results showed that the genotypes at loci C2161G in PRL and G294A in MTNR-1C were monomorphic as C and A, respectively. For the A237B in GH and A290T BMPR-1B mutations, two alleles were detected, giving three genotypes at each locus. In addition, the 24-bp difference of two genotype patterns provided an Indel-358 mutation in PRL while three alleles were identified at locus A459TC (MTNR-1C). Taken together, the polymorphic sites did not affect egg production except the A459TC locus in MTNR-1C gene (P=0.002), where quails carrying AA and CC genotypes provided the highest egg number (115.6-116.6 eggs/quail). Thus, the A459TC single nucleotide polymorphism is suggested to apply in other populations and it should be considered as a candidate marker for egg production.