Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trends and Lessons from Three Years Fighting Malicious Extensions

In this work we expose wide-spread efforts by criminals to abuse the Chrome Web Store as a platform for distributing malicious extensions. A central component of our study is the design and implementation of WebEval, the first system that broadly identifies malicious extensions with a concrete, measurable detection rate of 96.5%. Over the last three years we detected 9,523 malicious extensions: nearly 10% of every extension submitted to the store. Despite a short window of operation--we removed 50% of malware within 25 minutes of creation--a handful of under 100 extensions escaped immediate detection and infected over 50 million Chrome users. Our results highlight that the extension abuse ecosystem is drastically different from malicious binaries: miscreants profit from web traffic and user tracking rather than email spam or banking theft.
Cosmic rays from Galactic pulsars

We calculate energy spectra and mass composition of cosmic rays accelerated by the galactic population of pulsars during their radio and gamma-ray phase. It is assumed that a significant part of the pulsar rotational energy is lost on acceleration of iron nuclei extracted from the surface of the neutron star. The nuclei are accelerated, at first when passing the outer gap of the inner pulsar magnetosphere and later in the pulsar wind zone, to energies corresponding to 50% of the total potential drop through the polar cap region of the neutron star. We calculate energy spectra of the nuclei injected from the pulsar wind nebulae into the Galaxy including different energy loss processes of nuclei during their propagation in the pulsar magnetosphere and the expanding nebula, their fragmentation in collisions with radiation and matter, adiabatic energy losses, and escape from the nebula. Several models proposed for the distribution of the initial parameters of the galactic pulsar population are considered. It is shown that the best description of the observed cosmic ray spectrum and the mass composition between a few 10 15 eV and af ew 10 18 eV is obtained for the model B of Lorimer et al., in which the logs of initial pulsar periods and surface magnetic fields are given by the Gaussian distributions with the average values oflog P(ms)� = 2. 6a ndlog B(G)� = 12.3, respectively. In order to supply the cosmic rays into the Galaxy with the required rate, the product of the efficiency of cosmic ray acceleration by pulsars and their birth rate should be about 10 −2 yr −1 .
Efficient Methods for Influence-Based Network-Oblivious Community Detection

We study the problem of detecting social communities when the social graph is not available but instead we have access to a log of user activity, that is, a dataset of tuples (u, i, t) recording the fact that user u “adopted” item i at time t. We propose a stochastic framework that assumes that the adoption of items is governed by an underlying diffusion process over the unobserved social network and that such a diffusion model is based on community-level influence. That is, we aim at modeling communities through the lenses of social contagion. By fitting the model parameters to the user activity log, we learn the community membership and the level of influence of each user in each community. The general framework is instantiated with two different diffusion models, one with discrete time and one with continuous time, and we show that the computational complexity of both approaches is linear in the number of users and in the size of the propagation log. Experiments on synthetic data with planted community structure show that our methods outperform non-trivial baselines. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is further validated on real-word data, on which our methods are able to detect high-quality communities.
Convergence and Equivalence Results for the Jensen's Inequality—Application to Time-Delay and Sampled-Data Systems

The Jensen's inequality plays a crucial role in the analysis of time-delay and sampled-data systems. Its conservatism is studied through the use of the Grüss Inequality. It has been reported in the literature that fragmentation (or partitioning) schemes allow to empirically improve the results. We prove here that the Jensen's gap can be made arbitrarily small provided that the order of uniform fragmentation is chosen sufficiently large. Nonuniform fragmentation schemes are also shown to speed up the convergence in certain cases. Finally, a family of bounds is characterized and a comparison with other bounds of the literature is provided. It is shown that the other bounds are equivalent to Jensen's and that they exhibit interesting well-posedness and linearity properties which can be exploited to obtain better numerical results.
Deciphering the Anti-Aflatoxinogenic Properties of Eugenol Using a Large-Scale q-PCR Approach

Produced by several species of Aspergillus, Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) is a carcinogenic mycotoxin contaminating many crops worldwide. The utilization of fungicides is currently one of the most common methods; nevertheless, their use is not environmentally or economically sound. Thus, the use of natural compounds able to block aflatoxinogenesis could represent an alternative strategy to limit food and feed contamination. For instance, eugenol, a 4-allyl-2-methoxyphenol present in many essential oils, has been identified as an anti-aflatoxin molecule. However, its precise mechanism of action has yet to be clarified. The production of AFB1 is associated with the expression of a 70 kB cluster, and not less than 21 enzymatic reactions are necessary for its production. Based on former empirical data, a molecular tool composed of 60 genes targeting 27 genes of aflatoxin B1 cluster and 33 genes encoding the main regulatory factors potentially involved in its production, was developed. We showed that AFB1 inhibition in Aspergillus flavus following eugenol addition at 0.5 mM in a Malt Extract Agar (MEA) medium resulted in a complete inhibition of the expression of all but one gene of the AFB1 biosynthesis cluster. This transcriptomic effect followed a down-regulation of the complex composed by the two internal regulatory factors, AflR and AflS. This phenomenon was also influenced by an over-expression of veA and mtfA, two genes that are directly linked to AFB1 cluster regulation.
Functions of c-Jun in Liver and Heart Development

Mice lacking the AP-1 transcription factor c-Jun die around embryonic day E13.0 but little is known about the cell types affected as well as the cause of embryonic lethality. Here we show that a fraction of mutant E13.0 fetal livers exhibits extensive apoptosis of both hematopoietic cells and hepatoblasts, whereas the expression of 15 mRNAs, including those of albumin, keratin 18, hepatocyte nuclear factor 1, β-globin, and erythropoietin, some of which are putative AP-1 target genes, is not affected. Apoptosis of hematopoietic cells in mutant livers is most likely not due to a cell-autonomous defect, since c-jun −/− fetal liver cells are able to reconstitute all hematopoietic compartments of lethally irradiated recipient mice. A developmental analysis of chimeras showed contribution of c-jun −/− ES cell derivatives to fetal, but not to adult livers, suggesting a role of c-Jun in hepatocyte turnover. This is in agreement with the reduced mitotic and increased apoptotic rates found in primary liver cell cultures derived from c-jun −/− fetuses. Furthermore, a novel function for c-Jun was found in heart development. The heart outflow tract of c-jun −/− fetuses show malformations that resemble the human disease of a truncus arteriosus persistens. Therefore, the lethality of c-jun mutant fetuses is most likely due to pleiotropic defects reflecting the diversity of functions of c-Jun in development, such as a role in neural crest cell function, in the maintenance of hepatic hematopoiesis and in the regulation of apoptosis.
Beta 2-adrenoceptors in human lung and peripheral mononuclear leukocytes of untreated and terbutaline-treated patients.

Beta 2-adrenoceptor agonists act against bronchoconstriction by stimulating beta 2-adrenoceptors in bronchial smooth muscle. However, tachyphylaxis has been argued to occur because of beta 2-adrenoceptor down-regulation following therapy with beta 2-adrenergic agents. To investigate receptor alterations, human peripheral mononuclear leukocytes are frequently used, since human lung tissue is not easily available. In order to study whether beta 2-adrenoceptors in MNL reliably reflect the conditions in the human lung tissue, we compared MNL and human lung tissue of 18 patients who had to undergo lung resection. Ten patients were untreated, and eight had bronchodilator therapy prior to therapy with terbutaline because of bronchoconstriction. Both in human lung and MNL, the beta 2-adrenoceptor subpopulation was characterized by competition experiments with the beta 1-selective antagonist CGP 207.12 A and the beta 2-selective antagonist ICI 118.551. In MNL, a significant decrease in the density of beta 2-adrenoceptors was found in treated but not in untreated patients, while the antagonist affinity of the beta 2-adrenoceptors remained unchanged. However, in lung parenchyma, which was obtained at the very same time from the same patients, no down-regulation of the total amount of beta 2-adrenoceptors could be measured. It is concluded that MNLs are a reliable model for studying properties of beta 2-adrenoceptor regulation. However, the hereby obtained results show that MNLs do not reflect the conditions of beta 2-adrenoceptors in human lung tissue. Human lung tissue is found to be less susceptible than human MNL for beta 2-adrenoceptor down-regulation by terbutaline treatment at therapeutic doses. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Experimental evaluation of selected tree structures for exact and approximate k-nearest neighbor classification

Spatial data structures, for vector or metric spaces, are a well-known means to speed-up proximity queries. One of the common uses of the found neighbors of the query object is in classification methods, e.g., the famous k-nearest neighbor algorithm. Still, most experimental works focus on providing attractive tradeoffs between neighbor search times and the neighborhood quality, but they ignore the impact of such tradeoffs on the classification accuracy. In this paper, we explore a few simple approximate and probabilistic variants of two popular spatial data structures, the k-d tree and the ball tree, with k-NN results on real data sets. The main difference between these two structures is the location of input data - in all nodes (k-d tree), or in the leaves (ball tree) - and for this reason they act as good representatives of other spatial structures. We show that in several cases significant speedups compared to the use of such structures in the exact k-NN classification are possible, with a moderate penalty in accuracy. We conclude that the usage of the k-d tree is a more promising approach.
Importance of Tryptophan in Transforming an Amphipathic Peptide into a Pseudomonas aeruginosa-Targeted Antimicrobial Peptide

Here, we found that simple substitution of amino acids in the middle position of the hydrophobic face of an amphipathic peptide RI16 with tryptophan (T9W) considerably transformed into an antimicrobial peptide specifically targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) results demonstrated that T9W had a strong and specifically antimicrobial activity against P. aeruginosa, including antibiotic-resistant strains, but was not active against Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium, Staphylococcus aureus and Staphyfococcus epidermidis. Fluorescent spectroscopic assays indicated that T9W interacted with the membrane of P. aeruginosa, depolarizing the outer and the inner membrane of bacterial cells. Salt susceptibility assay showed that T9W still maintained its strong anti-pseudomonas activity in the presence of salts at physiological concentrations, and in hemolytic and MTT assays T9W also showed no toxicity against human blood cells and macrophages. In vivo assay demonstrated that T9W also displayed no toxicity to Chinese Kun Ming (KM) mice. Furthermore, the strong antibiofilm activity was also observed with the peptide T9W, which decreased the percentage of biomass formation in a dose-dependent manner. Overall, these findings indicated that design of single-pathogen antimicrobial agents can be achieved by simple amino acid mutation in naturally occurring peptide sequences and this study suggested a model of optimization/design of anti-pseudomonas drugs in which the tryptophan residue was a conserved element.
Recent Advances in Developing Inhibitors for Hypoxia-Inducible Factor Prolyl Hydroxylases and Their Therapeutic Implications

Hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) prolyl hydroxylases (PHDs) are members of the 2-oxoglutarate dependent non-heme iron dioxygenases. Due to their physiological roles in regulation of HIF-1α stability, many efforts have been focused on searching for selective PHD inhibitors to control HIF-1α levels for therapeutic applications. In this review, we first describe the structure of PHD2 as a molecular basis for structure-based drug design (SBDD) and various experimental methods developed for measuring PHD activity. We further discuss the current status of the development of PHD inhibitors enabled by combining SBDD approaches with high-throughput screening. Finally, we highlight the clinical implications of small molecule PHD inhibitors.
Mixed QCD-electroweak corrections to Higgs boson production in gluon fusion

We compute the 3-loop (ααs) correction to the Higgs boson production cross section arising from light quarks using an effective theory approach. Our calculation probes the factorization of QCD and electroweak perturbative corrections to this process. We combine our results with the best current estimates for contributions from top and bottom quarks to derive an updated theoretical prediction for the Higgs boson production cross section in gluon fusion. With the use of the MSTW 2008 parton distribution functions that include the newest experimental data, our study results in cross sections approximately 4–6% lower for intermediate Higgs boson masses than those used in recent Tevatron analyses that imposed a 95% confidence level exclusion limit of a Standard Model Higgs boson with MH = 170 GeV.
Functional diversity of T-cell subpopulations in subacute and chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis.

RATIONALE Hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP) exhibits a diverse outcome. Patients with acute/subacute HP usually improve, whereas patients with chronic disease often progress to fibrosis. However, the mechanisms underlying this difference are unknown. OBJECTIVES To examine the T-cell profile from patients with subacute HP and chronic HP. METHODS T cells were obtained by bronchoalveolar lavage from 25 patients with subacute HP, 30 patients with chronic HP, and 8 control subjects. T-cell phenotype and functional profile were evaluated by flow cytometry, cytometric bead array, and immunohistochemistry. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Patients with chronic HP showed higher CD4+:CD8+ ratio (median, 3.05; range, 0.3-15; subacute HP: median, 1.3; range, 0.1-10; control: median, 1.3; range, 0.7-2.0; P < 0.01), and a decrease of gammadeltaT cells (median, 2.0; range, 0.5-3.4; subacute HP: median, 10; range, 4.8-17; control: median, 15; range, 5-19; P < 0.01). Patients with chronic HP exhibited an increase in the terminally differentiated memory CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell subsets compared with patients with subacute HP (P < 0.05). However, memory cells from chronic HP showed lower IFN-gamma production and decreased cytotoxic activity by CD8+ T lymphocytes. Chronic HP displayed a Th2-like phenotype with increased CXCR4 expression (median, 6%; range, 1.7-36, vs. control subjects: median, 0.7%; range, 0.2-1.4; and subacute HP: median, 2.2%; range, 0.1-5.3; P < 0.01), and decreased CXCR3 expression (median, 4.3%; range, 1.4-25%, vs. subacute HP: median, 37%; range, 4.9-78%; P < 0.01). Likewise, supernatants from antigen-specific-stimulated cells from chronic HP produced higher levels of IL-4 (80 +/- 63 pg/ml vs. 25 +/- 7 pg/ml; P < 0.01), and lower levels of IFN-gamma (3,818 +/- 1671 pg/ml vs. 100 +/- 61 pg/ml; P < 0.01) compared with subacute HP. CONCLUSIONS Our findings indicate that patients with chronic HP lose effector T-cell function and exhibit skewing toward Th2 activity, which may be implicated in the fibrotic response that characterizes this clinical form.
The power of neuroimaging biomarkers for screening frontotemporal dementia

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a clinically and pathologically heterogeneous neurodegenerative disease that can result from either frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) or Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. It is critical to establish statistically powerful biomarkers that can achieve substantial cost‐savings and increase the feasibility of clinical trials. We assessed three broad categories of neuroimaging methods to screen underlying FTLD and AD pathology in a clinical FTD series: global measures (e.g., ventricular volume), anatomical volumes of interest (VOIs) (e.g., hippocampus) using a standard atlas, and data‐driven VOIs using Eigenanatomy. We evaluated clinical FTD patients (N = 93) with cerebrospinal fluid, gray matter (GM) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to assess whether they had underlying FTLD or AD pathology. Linear regression was performed to identify the optimal VOIs for each method in a training dataset and then we evaluated classification sensitivity and specificity in an independent test cohort. Power was evaluated by calculating minimum sample sizes required in the test classification analyses for each model. The data‐driven VOI analysis using a multimodal combination of GM MRI and DTI achieved the greatest classification accuracy (89% sensitive and 89% specific) and required a lower minimum sample size (N = 26) relative to anatomical VOI and global measures. We conclude that a data‐driven VOI approach using Eigenanatomy provides more accurate classification, benefits from increased statistical power in unseen datasets, and therefore provides a robust method for screening underlying pathology in FTD patients for entry into clinical trials. Hum Brain Mapp 35:4827–4840, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
IMPACT OF ASYMMETRY ON INTEREST PASS-THOUGH MECHANISM : EVIDENCE FROM TAIWAN AND HONG KONG

This study employs the asymmetric threshold cointegration test suggested by Enders and Siklos (2001) and creates EC-EGARCH(1, 1)M model to investigate the pass-through of money market rate to banking retail rates in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It further explores the impact of interest volatility on interest rates. Over the period of February 1988 to December 2004, we find that the interest pass-though mechanism of these two markets are non-complete. In addition, based on the asymmetric threshold cointegration test, we discover the existence of asymmetric cointegration relationship between deposit and lending rates in both markets. In particular, while employing EC-EGARCH (1, 1)-M model to test for the influence of money market rate adjustment and volatility on retail rates in short-run, we find robust evidence that there exist the upward rigidity in deposit rate and the downward rigidity in lending rate in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. This finding supports the hypothesis of the collusive pricing arrangements. Furthermore, interest volatility should cause a smaller margin of variation for Taiwans deposit/lending rates and wider margin for Hong Kongs lending rate.
A polycrystalline graphite model for the 2175 Å interstellar extinction band

A random, hydrogen-free, assembly of microscopic sp 2 carbon chips, forming a macroscopically homogeneous and isotropic solid, is proposed as a model carrier for the ultraviolet (UV) interstellar extinction band. The validity of this model is based on the calculation of the Bruggeman average dielectric function of a mixture of the known parallel and perpendicular dielectric functions of graphite. The π absorption feature of Rayleigh-sized spheres of this mixture falls near 4.6 μm -1 (2175 A), but its width is 1.5 μm -1 , somewhat larger than the astronomically observed average, 1 μm -1 . This is confirmed by measurements of the reflectance of an industrial material, polycrystalline graphite. A better fit to the interstellar feature position and width is obtained with a hypothetical material, having the same dielectric functions as natural graphite, except for less extended wings of the π resonance. Physically, this could result from changes in the electronic band structure due to previous thermal histories. In this model, the Frolich feature central wavelength depends only on the π resonance frequency, while its width depends only on the damping constant of the same resonance. This explains the range of observed feature widths at constant feature wavelength.
Diminishing Margins: Housing Market Declines and Family Financial Responses

We utilize data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to study borrowing decisions and other factors related to the run-up in housing prices in 1999-2007, their precipitous decline in 2007-2009, and how they contributed to mortgage distress and foreclosures as of 2009-2011. Difficulties were concentrated in selected real estate markets where the Case Shiller home index declined more than 35% from 2007 to 2009. Often expecting further price appreciation or responding to a positive family labor market and income circumstance, homeowners, supported by their lenders, allocated too much of their family income to support house payments and put themselves in a risky position. The year of taking the original mortgage, the rate of decrease in the Case-Shiller home price index, household wealth, and labor market and disability status are substantial predictors of mortgage payment distress and foreclosure.
College Readiness for English Language Learners (ELLs) in California: Assessing Equity for ELLs under the Local Control Funding Formula

ABSTRACT English Learners (ELs) represent critical mass of K-12 students in public schools across the nation. However, states have failed to improve EL student academic outcomes, including college readiness. In 2013, California altered its school funding policy, providing additional support for English learners. Drawing on Vertical Equity and a Critical Community Strength Framework, this study examines the impact of local funding on college readiness among EL students by analyzing accountability plans and secondary data of 13 districts and assessing reforms using markers of college readiness. Document analysis shows: 1) school districts’ prioritization, 2) resource allocation based on those priorities, and 3) different approaches to operationalizing the construct of equity. Secondary data analysis reveals EL students lagged behind peers in performance on state assessments and enrollment in college preparatory and Advanced Placement varied across districts. These data confirm the critical need for intervention and targeted investment to raise overall college readiness rates among EL students in California and have national implications for states with growing Latino and EL student populations.