Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Security and survivability of distributed systems: an overview

Society is growing increasingly dependent upon large-scale, highly distributed systems that operate in unbounded network environments, which like the Internet, have no central administrative control and no unified security policy. Despite the best efforts of security practitioners, no amount of system hardening can assure that a system that is connected to an unbounded network will be invulnerable to attack. The discipline of network survivability and security can help ensure that such systems can deliver essential services and maintain essential properties such as integrity, confidentiality and performance, despite the presence of intrusion. Unlike the traditional security policies that require central control for instance or administration, survivability is intended to address unbounded network environments. Furthermore, since survivability requires robustness under conditions of intrusion, failure, or accident, it includes the concept of fault tolerance. This paper formulates the basic issues to be solved in this new field, discusses and comments some current solution concepts and finally outlines the most challenging future research avenues.
The cluster concept: cooperative networks and replicability

An increasing amount of attention is being paid in the literature to business networks and the potential for clustering among small firms to bring about economic growth through productivity gains based on collaboration. The idea that industry concentration through clustering and networking can deliver such gains underlies industry and regional development policy in many countries. Formal policy mechanisms have been introduced in several developed economies in recent years to address structural deficiencies and raise competitiveness by encouraging cooperation among small and medium enterprises. The evidence supporting the effectiveness of such programmes, however, is mixed. This paper reviews the concept of clustering and examines both mature, naturally-evolved industry concentrations and newly formed cluster networks. The paper explores conceptual issues emerging from the debate in the literature surrounding the network paradigm and its replicability.
Rural tourism microentrepreneurs’ self-representation through photography: a counter-hegemonic approach

ABSTRACT American rural social geography has been subjected to simplified and standardised projections and stereotyping by hegemonic tourism media. Urban-centred advertising of rural tourism destinations is a powerful medium in creating hegemony and hierarchy between urban and rural communities. The act of representing rural social geographies through tourism creates discourse which dialectically creates and reinforces the modified social status quo of rural societies. Hence, aiming for social change and to magnify the rural subaltern voice, this article adopted auto-photography as an ethnographic participatory method. Fourteen rural tourism microentrepreneurs from the Piedmont region of North Carolina, United States, participated in self-representational photography of the aspects of life they wished to share with urbanites. Interviews were conducted using participants’ favourite photos as prompts. Critical discourse analysis was employed to identify rural tourism microentrepreneurs’ self-representations that counter urban-normativity. Findings show microentrepreneurs resisted and complied with an urban-normative tourism-based ideological hegemony.
High-growth firms and technological knowledge: do gazelles follow exploration or exploitation strategies?

This paper analyzes the contribution of high-growth firms to the process of knowledge creation. We articulate a demand-pull innovation framework in which knowledge creation is driven by sales growth, and knowledge stems from creative recombination. Given the established literature on high growth firms and economic growth, we wonder whether gazelles follow patterns of knowledge creation mostly dominated by exploration or exploitation strategies. To this purpose, we derive indicators able to describe the structure of knowledge and qualify firms' innovation strategies. The empirical results suggest that the reality is richer than the interpretative frameworks. Increasing growth rates are indeed associated to exploration strategies, supporting the idea that high growth firms are key actors in the creation of new technological knowledge. But in the meantime, firms showing growth rates significantly higher than the average are able to command the exploration strategies by constraining them within the boundaries of familiar technological competences, suggesting that the exploration process is less random than anticipated. We end up with the result that high growth firms, and especially gazelles, follow predominantly an exploration strategy, but with the characteristics of an organized search which is often more observed in an exploitation strategy.
In vitro induction of cytotoxic effector cells with spontaneous killer cell specificity

The present work shows that stimulation of peripheral blood lymphocytes with autologous or allogeneic B-cell lines leads to a strong induction of cytotoxic effector cells with spontaneous killer (SK) cell specificity, apart from the specific response directed against the particular stimulating cell. To demonstrate this we have determined a relative target cell specificity in the SK system, defined by the short- term 51Cr release assay, and established a relative specificity index (RSI). Using this approach we have been able to show that killer cells induced during a 5-day cocultivation period with B-cell lines have a similar PSI to that of unstimulated SK cells. In addition, we have shown that such killer cells can be induced from several different lymphocyte subpopulations and that they, in contrast to SK cells, do not express Fc receptors. The implications of these findings in relation to the nature, mechanism, and biological significance of the SK cell system is discussed.
A Question of Quality: The Higher Education Ratings Game. AAHE-ERIC/Higher Education Research Report No. 5, 1980.

Studies concerning attributes of quality in higher education as defined in academic studies are reviewed. Separate reviews are presented for studies of quality at the graduate level, in professional programs, and at the undergraduate level. Academe's continuing attempts to quantify "quality" so as to measure it empirically rather than subjectively through reputational ratings are examined. In addition, accreditation and state program review, both of which exemplify external approaches to assessing quality in American higher education, are discussed. In academic studies, usually conducted by researchers from the higher education community, assessments have focused on identifying the best institutions (or graduate departments). It is concluded that whether based on peer review or on the application of a set of traditionally-used quantifiable indicators, such assessments ignore. about 99 percent of the nation's higher education institutions. It is suggested that these rankings serve to reinforce the hierarchical structure of the system, whereby material and human wealth tend to be concentrated in a few institutions. It is also noted that the teaching-learning function cf higher education has been virtually ignored in quality assessments. Conclusions and recommendations as to how quality in higher education might be better defined and how methods of assessing quality might be improved are presented. A bibliography is included
Toll-like receptor 2 agonist exacerbates renal injury in diabetic mice

Inflammation is implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy (DN). Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) is a ligand-activated membrane-bound receptor, which induces an inflammatory response, thus serving a crucial role in the pathogenesis of DN. The present study aimed to determine whether a TLR2 agonist, Pam3CysSK4, modulates the development of DN. A mouse model of DN was induced using streptozotocin (STZ) and, following the confirmation of hyperglycemia, mice were treated with or without Pam3CysSK4. Pathological and functional markers, including the activation of nuclear factor (NF)-κB, expression of TLR2, inflammatory infiltration, myeloid differentiation primary response gene 88 and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 were assessed. STZ-treated mice exhibited elevated blood glucose levels and increased serum creatinine levels, which increased further following Pam3CysSK4 treatment. In addition, Pam3CysSK4 treatment was observed to increase podocyte foot process formation. Furthermore, STZ-induced renal glomerular sclerosis was significantly exacerbated in Pam3CysSK4-treated mice. Pam3CysSK4-treated mice also exhibited increased levels of collagen IV following renal immunostaining, associated with increased macrophage infiltration. Renal expression of TLR2 was markedly elevated in STZ-induced mice; this was further increased in Pam3CysSK4-treated mice, accompanied by upregulation of proinflammatory genes and activation of NF-κB. This indicates that enhanced renal expression of TLR2 is associated with inflammatory infiltration in DN and demonstrates that renal injury was exacerbated by the TLR2 agonist in diabetic mice.
An Efficient Method for Document Categorization Based on Word2vec and Latent Semantic Analysis

Document categorization is the process of classifying documents from many mixed documents automatically, and the main problem is how to express document content in vector space completely. This paper proposes a new model named Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) + word2vec to categorize documents. This is the first attempt of combining word2vec with LSA at document categorization and it can map document to vector space under the premise of keeping document contents fully. At first, we create a term by document matrix and the element of which is decided by Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting and word vector trained by word2vec. This matrix is a 3-dimensional matrix and it can describe the meaning of every word and the content of every document exactly. Secondly, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is executed on the matrix and lower computational complexity is gained from this. The model is named LSA + word2vec. Then, document vector gained from the new model are put into Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to train. CNN is an efficient deep learning algorithm, which improves the accuracy of classification greatly. We evaluate the performance based on the 20newsgroups corpus. The results show that our new model achieves better effects on document categorization tasks, and the accuracy made about 15% improvement than traditional methods, such as LSA and Vector Space Model (VSM).
Asymbiotic germination response to photoperiod and nutritional media in six populations of Calopogon tuberosus var. tuberosus (Orchidaceae): evidence for ecotypic differentiation.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Ecotypic differentiation has been explored in numerous plant species, but has been largely ignored in the Orchidaceae. Applying a specific germination protocol for widespread seed sources may be unreliable due to inherent physiological or genetic differences in localized populations. It is crucial to determine whether ecotypic differentiation exists for restoration and conservation programmes. Calopogon tuberosus var. tuberosus, a widespread terrestrial orchid of eastern North America, is a model species to explore ecotypic differences in germination requirements, as this species occupies diverse habitats spanning a wide geographical range. METHODS Mature seeds were collected from south Florida, north central Florida, three locations in South Carolina, and the upper Michigan peninsula. Effects of three photoperiods (8/16, 12/12, 16/8 h L/D) were examined on asymbiotic in vitro seed germination and seedling development of C. tuberosus. Germination and early development was monitored for 8 weeks, while advanced development was monitored for an additional 8 weeks. In an additional experiment, asymbiotic seed germination and development was monitored for 8 weeks on six culture media (BM-1 terrestrial orchid medium, Knudson C, Malmgrem, half-strength MS, P723, and Vacin and Went). A tetrazolium test for embryo viability was performed. KEY RESULTS Short days promoted the highest germination among Florida populations, but few differences among photoperiods in other seed sources existed. Different media had little effect on the germination of Michigan and Florida populations, but germination of South Carolina seeds was higher on media with higher calcium and magnesium. Tetrazolium testing confirmed that South Carolina seeds exhibited low viability while viability was higher in Florida seeds. Seed germination and corm formation was rapid in Michigan seeds across all treatments. Michigan seedlings allocated more biomass to corms compared with other seed sources. CONCLUSIONS Rapid germination and corm formation may be a survival mechanism in response to a compressed growing season in northern populations. Ecotypic differentiation may be occurring based on seed germination and corm formation data.
DO CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE INFLUENCE CSR REPORTING QUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA, INDIA, MALAYSIA AND THE UNITED KINGDOM

This study provides preliminary findings on CSR disclosure practices in various reporting media used by 70 big corporations in China, India, Malaysia and the UK. It also investigates whether national culture, corporate governance and the existence of a CSR committee on the board influence the quality of CSR. Results show that CSR disclosures on websites and stand-alone reports have better quality than annual reports. The quality of CSR disclosure varies across countries, with UK corporations being the best reporters, followed by India and Malaysia. Chinese corporations ranked last when annual reports were compared. However, they appeared as good as India when the websites and stand-alone reports were analysed. The quality of CSR disclosure increases with the existence of CSR committees on the board; and national culture partly influences the disclosure. Overall, the results suggest that CSR reporting in emerging markets could be enhanced through changes in companies’ governance structure.
A Tool for Automated Fall Risk Classification

For elderly it is more likely to fall and a fall can lead to severe injuries. Furthermore there is an ongoing discussion, if manual methods without any sensing and computing hardware or automated methods with the support of sensors and computing hardware are better in classifying elderly in regard of their risk to fall. Beside of these discussions, new sensing hardware allows the improvement of existing approaches so that automated fall risk classification can i) use very cheap pressure-sensing hardware, ii) can easily be used by nursing staff, and iii) keep the assessment time short. We present in this paper a tool for automated fall risk classification, which applies the leaning test. We also show that our approach with low measuring frequency and the rather coarse resolution of surface under pressure is able to achieve repeatable and reliable classification results.
Functional Identification of a Pulvinar Path from Superior Colliculus to Cortical Area MT

The idea of a second visual pathway, in which visual signals travel from brainstem to cortex via the pulvinar thalamus, has had considerable influence as an alternative to the primary geniculo-striate pathway. Existence of this second pathway in primates, however, is not well established. A major question centers on whether the pulvinar acts as a relay, particularly in the path from the superior colliculus (SC) to the motion area in middle temporal cortex (MT). We used physiological microstimulation to identify pulvinar neurons belonging to the path from SC to MT in the macaque. We made three salient observations. First, we identified many neurons in the visual pulvinar that received input from SC or projected to MT, as well as a largely separate set of neurons that received input from MT. Second, and more importantly, we identified a subset of neurons as relay neurons that both received SC input and projected to MT. The identification of these relay neurons demonstrates a continuous functional path from SC to MT through the pulvinar in primates. Third, we histologically localized a subset of SC–MT relay neurons to the subdivision of inferior pulvinar known to project densely to MT but also localized SC–MT relay neurons to an adjacent subdivision. This pattern indicates that the pulvinar pathway is not limited to a single anatomically defined region. These findings bring new perspective to the functional organization of the pulvinar and its role in conveying signals to the cerebral cortex.
Study on Comprehensive Evaluation Method of Pilot Mental Workload

Diverse flight situations will have different influences on the function of a pilot's brain. To study these influences and confirm the sensitivity of related measurements, flight simulation tasks are carried out on an aircraft cockpit ergonomics evaluation experimental base. Subjects are required to monitor the changes of flight information and make corresponding flight operations simultaneously. Different quantities of abnormal information on the head-up display are handled so that pilot mental workload can be divided into four levels. Subjective assessment, behavior performance and physiological measurements are comprehensively applied to evaluate subjects' mental workload. Experiment results indicate that both subjective assessment based on NASA Task Load Index (TLX) and behavior performance can reflect the changes of pilot mental workload, heart rate variability, mean pupil diameter and eyelid opening indices are sensitive to mental workload in terms of physiological measurements. Combining all above measurements, a comprehensive evaluation method can provide a reasonable basis of pilot mental workload assessment and classification under complex flight tasks.
Regular sensor deployment patterns for p-coverage and q-connectivity in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we study the regular sensor deployment patterns to achieve p-coverage and q-connectivity (q ≤ 6) under different ratios of sensor nodes communication range (rc) to their sensing range (rs) for wireless sensor networks. In particular, we propose the triangular lattice, square grid, and hexagon deployment patterns to achieve p-coverage and q-connectivity. To form such regular deployment patterns for given p and q values, we present the distance between sensor nodes as well as the relationship between rc and rs. We will get this information by using the inverse method of the proposed theorems which estimate the coverage level of the target region when sensors are deployed. We also compare the efficiency of the proposed regular deployment patterns in terms of the number of sensors needed to provide p-coverage and q-connectivity.
Towards the Human Genotope

The human genotope is the convex hull of all allele frequency vectors that can be obtained from the genotypes present in the human population. In this paper we take a few initial steps towards a description of this object, which may be fundamental for future population based genetics studies. Here we use data from the HapMap Project, restricted to two ENCODE regions, to study a subpolytope of the human genotope. We study three different approaches for obtaining informative low-dimensional projections of this subpolytope. The projections are specified by projection onto few tag SNPs, principal component analysis, and archetypal analysis. We describe the application of our geometric approach to identifying structure in populations based on single nucleotide polymorphisms.
High‐Current Stimuli to the Spared Epicardium of a Large Infarct Induce Ventricular Tachycardia

BackgroundPrevious studies have demonstrated that both ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF) may begin as figure-eight reentry: VT with a longer cycle length from spared tissue adjacent to an infarct by programmed stimulation and VF with a shorter cycle length from noninfarcted tissue by a large premature S2 stimulus. These results suggest that the type of tissue or cycle length of the arrhythmia rather than the mode of induction determines whether the figure eight becomes sustained VT or degenerates into VF. Thus, a protocol similar to that by which a VF threshold is determined may induce VT rather than VF when performed in the spared tissue over an infarct. Methods and ResultsIn 10 dogs, 4 days after occlusion-reperfusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery, 10 S1 stimuli were delivered from a total of 34 right and left ventricular sites outside the infarct. An epicardial S2 stimulus over the infarct was increased in 10-mA steps and introduced in diastole at decreasing cycle lengths of 5 msec until VT or VF was induced. Sustained monomorphic figure-eight VT was induced from 24 S1 sites and VF from nine (p=0.03). The mean cycle lengths for the initial six arrhythmic cycles was 152±33 msec for VT and 115±13 msec for VF (p<0.001). Mean transmural infarct extent was 80%So in five dogs with only VT, 63% in three dogs with both VT and VF, and 15% in two dogs with only VF. Different morphologies of VT were induced by changing the S1 site, the S2 strength, or the S1S2 coupling interval. In 25 of the 34 arrhythmias, the central part of the initial figure-eight pathway was oriented opposite the S1 activation sequence in that region. ConclusionsA large S2 stimulus over a nontransmural infarct induces VT if the spared myocardium is thin. This study introduces a useful technique for inducing sustained monomorphic VT in which the location and direction of the figure-eight pathway are known a priori and in which different morphologies of sustained VT can be produced by changing the S1 site.
Research article ANTIGLYCATION, ANTIOXIDANT AND ANTIDIABETIC ACTIVITY OF MATURE STRAWBERRY (FRAGARIA × ANANASSA) FRUITS

A comprehensive in vitro study involving antiglycation, antioxidant and anti-diabetic assays was carried out in mature fruits of strawberry. The effect of aqueous extract of mature strawberry fruits on glycation of guanosine with glucose and fructose with or without oxidizing entities like reactive oxygen species was analyzed. Spectral studies showed that glycation and/or fructation of guanosine was significantly inhibited by aqueous extract of strawberry. The UV absorbance of the glycation reactions was found to be maximum at 24 hrs. and decreased consecutively for 48, 72 and 96 hours. Inhibition of oxidative damage due to reactive oxygen species was also observed in presence of the plant extract. To our knowledge, antiglycation activity of strawberry fruit with reference to guanosine is being demonstrated for the first time. To determine the antioxidant activity of the plant extract, in vitro antioxidant enzymes assays (catalase, peroxidase, polyphenol oxidase and ascorbic acid oxidase) and antioxidant assays (DPPH, superoxide anion scavenging activity and xanthine oxidase) were performed. Maximum inhibition activity of 79.36%, 65.62% and 62.78% was observed for DPPH, superoxide anion scavenging and xanthine oxidase, respectively. In antidiabetic assays, IC50 value for alpha - amylase and alpha - glucosidase activity of fruit extract of strawberry was found to be 86.47 ± 1. 12µg/ml and 76.83 ± 0.93 µg/ml, respectively. Thus, the aqueous extract of strawberry showed antiglycation, antioxidant and antidiabetic properties indicating that strawberry fruits, as a dietary supplement, may be utilized towards management of diabetes.