Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Path-quality monitoring in the presence of adversaries

Edge networks connected to the Internet need effective monitoring techniques to drive routing decisions and detect violations of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, existing measurement tools, like ping, traceroute, and trajectory sampling, are vulnerable to attacks that can make a path look better than it really is. In this paper, we design and analyze path-quality monitoring protocols that reliably raise an alarm when the packet-loss rate and delay exceed a threshold, even when an adversary tries to bias monitoring results by selectively delaying, dropping, modifying, injecting, or preferentially treating packets. Despite the strong threat model we consider in this paper, our protocols are efficient enough to run at line rate on high-speed routers. We present a secure sketching protocol for identifying when packet loss and delay degrade beyond a threshold. This protocol is extremely lightweight, requiring only 250-600 bytes of storage and periodic transmission of a comparably sized IP packet to monitor billions of packets. We also present secure sampling protocols that provide faster feedback and accurate round-trip delay estimates, at the expense of somewhat higher storage and communication costs. We prove that all our protocols satisfy a precise definition of secure path-quality monitoring and derive analytic expressions for the trade-off between statistical accuracy and system overhead. We also compare how our protocols perform in the client-server setting, when paths are asymmetric, and when packet marking is not permitted.
When Crowds Give You Lemons

Following successful crowd ideation contests, organizations in search of the "next big thing" are left with hundreds of ideas. Expert-based idea filtering is lengthy and costly; therefore, crowd-based strategies are often employed. Unfortunately, these strategies typically (1) do not separate the mediocre from the excellent, and (2) direct all the attention to certain idea concepts, while others starve. We introduce DBLemons - a crowd-based idea filtering strategy that addresses these issues by (1) asking voters to identify the worst rather than the best ideas using a "bag of lemons'' voting approach, and (2) by exposing voters to a wider idea spectrum, thanks to a dynamic diversity-based ranking system balancing idea quality and coverage. We compare DBLemons against two state-of-the-art idea filtering strategies in a real-world setting. Results show that DBLemons is more accurate, less time-consuming, and reduces the idea space in half while still retaining 94% of the top ideas.
Learning Deterministic Regular Expressions for the Inference of Schemas from XML Data

Inferring an appropriate DTD or XML Schema Definition (XSD) for a given collection of XML documents essentially reduces to learning deterministic regular expressions from sets of positive example words. Unfortunately, there is no algorithm capable of learning the complete class of deterministic regular expressions from positive examples only, as we will show. The regular expressions occurring in practical DTDs and XSDs, however, are such that every alphabet symbol occurs only a small number of times. As such, in practice it suffices to learn the subclass of deterministic regular expressions in which each alphabet symbol occurs at most k times, for some small k. We refer to such expressions as k-occurrence regular expressions (k-OREs for short). Motivated by this observation, we provide a probabilistic algorithm that learns k-OREs for increasing values of k, and selects the deterministic one that best describes the sample based on a Minimum Description Length argument. The effectiveness of the method is empirically validated both on real world and synthetic data. Furthermore, the method is shown to be conservative over the simpler classes of expressions considered in previous work.
Rx: Treating bugs as allergies—a safe method to survive software failures

Many applications demand availability. Unfortunately, software failures greatly reduce system availability. Prior work on surviving software failures suffers from one or more of the following limitations: required application restructuring, inability to address deterministic software bugs, unsafe speculation on program execution, and long recovery time. This paper proposes an innovative safe technique, called Rx, which can quickly recover programs from many types of software bugs, both deterministic and nondeterministic. Our idea, inspired from allergy treatment in real life, is to rollback the program to a recent checkpoint upon a software failure, and then to reexecute the program in a modified environment. We base this idea on the observation that many bugs are correlated with the execution environment, and therefore can be avoided by removing the “allergen” from the environment. Rx requires few to no modifications to applications and provides programmers with additional feedback for bug diagnosis. We have implemented Rx on Linux. Our experiments with five server applications that contain seven bugs of various types show that Rx can survive six out of seven software failures and provide transparent fast recovery within 0.017--0.16 seconds, 21--53 times faster than the whole program restart approach for all but one case (CVS). In contrast, the two tested alternatives, a whole program restart approach and a simple rollback and reexecution without environmental changes, cannot successfully recover the four servers (Squid, Apache, CVS, and ypserv) that contain deterministic bugs, and have only a 40% recovery rate for the server (MySQL) that contains a nondeterministic concurrency bug. Additionally, Rx's checkpointing system is lightweight, imposing small time and space overheads.
The Development of Infants’ Expectations for Event Timing

The capacity to process and incorporate temporal information into behavioural decisions is an integral component for functioning in our environment. Whereas previous research has extended adults’ temporal processing capacity down the developmental timeline to infants, little research has examined infants’ capacity to use that temporal information in guiding their future behaviours and whether this capacity can detect event-timing differences on the order of milliseconds. The present study examined 3- and 6-month-old infants’ ability to process temporal durations of 700 and 1200 milliseconds by means of the Visual Expectation Cueing Paradigm in which the duration of a central stimulus predicted either a target appearing on the left or on the right of a screen. If 3- and 6-month-old infants could discriminate the milliseconds difference between the centrally-presented temporal cues, then they would correctly make anticipatory eye movements to the proper target location at a rate above chance. Results indicated that 6- but not 3-month-olds successfully discriminated and incorporated events’ temporal information into their visual expectations. Brain maturation and the perceptual capacity to discriminate the relative timing values of temporal events may account for these findings. This developmental limitation in processing and discriminating events on the scale of milliseconds, consequently, may be a limiting factor for attentional and cognitive development that has not previously been explored.
Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug hypersensitivity in the Asia-Pacific

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) hypersensitivity reactions (HSRs) are often nonimmunologically mediated reactions which present with immediate HSR type manifestations. These are mediated by cyclooxygenase inhibition resulting in shunting towards the excessive production of leukotrienes. Important disease associations include asthma, nasal polyposis, and chronic spontaneous urticaria, especially among adults. The European Network on Drug Allergy/Global Allergy and Asthma European Network 2013 classification of NSAID HSR comprises nonselective HSR i.e., NSAID exacerbated respiratory disease (NERD), NSAIDs exacerbated cutaneous disease (NECD), NSAIDs induced urticarial-angioedema (NIUA); and selective (allergic) HSR i.e., single NSAID induced urticaria/angioedema or anaphylaxis, NSAIDs-induced delayed HSR. Much of the literature on genetic associations with NSAID HSR originate from Korea and Japan; where genetic polymorphisms have been described in genes involved in arachidonic acid metabolism, basophil/mast cell/eosinophil activation, various inflammatory mediators/cytokines, and different HLA genotypes. The Asian phenotype for NSAID HSR appears to be predominantly NIUA with overlapping features in some adults and children. NECD also appears to be more common than NERD, although both are not common in the Asian paediatric population. Between adults and children, children seem to be more atopic, although over time when these children grow up, it is likely that the prevalence of atopic adults with NSAID HSR will increase. Low-dose aspirin desensitization has been shown to be effective in the treatment of coronary artery disease, especially following percutaneous coronary intervention.
Patterns of cooperative interaction: Linking ethnomethodology and design

Patterns of Cooperative Interaction are regularities in the organisation of work, activity, and interaction among participants, and with, through, and around artifacts. These patterns are organised around a framework and are inspired by how such regularities are highlighted in ethnomethodologically-informed ethnographic studies of work and technology. They comprise a high level description and two or more comparable examples drawn from specific studies. Our contention is that these patterns form a useful resource for reusing findings from previous field studies, for enabling analysis and considering design in new settings. Previous work on the relationship between ethnomethodology and design has been concerned primarily in providing presentation frameworks and mechanisms, practical advice, schematisations of the ethnomethodologist's role, different possibilities of input at different stages in development, and various conceptualisations of the relationship between study and design. In contrast, this article seeks to first discuss the position of patterns relative to emergent major topics of interest of these studies. Subsequently it seeks to describe the case for the collection of patterns based on findings, their comparison across studies and their general implications for design problems, rather than the concerns of practical and methodological interest outlined in the other work. Special attention is paid to our evaluations and to how they inform how the patterns collection may be read, used and contributed to, as well as to reflections on the composition of the collection as it has emerged. The paper finishes, first, with a discussion of how our work relates to other work on patterns, before some closing comments are made on the role of our patterns and ethnomethodology in systems design.
Effects of a sex ratio gradient on female mate-copying and choosiness in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract In many sexually reproducing species, individuals can gather information about potential mates by observing their mating success. This behavioral pattern, that we call mate-copying, was reported in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster where females choosing between 2 males of contrasting phenotypes can build a preference for males of the phenotype they previously saw being chosen by a demonstrator female. As sex ratio is known to affect mate choice, our goal was to test whether mate-copying is also affected by encountered sex ratios. Thus, we created a gradient of sex ratio during demonstrations of mate-copying experiments by changing the number of females observing from a central arena 6 simultaneous demonstrations unfolding in 6 peripheral compartments of a hexagonal device. We also tested whether the sex ratio experienced by females during demonstrations affected their choosiness (male courtship duration and double courtship rate) in subsequent mate-choice tests. Experimental male:female sex ratio during demonstrations did not affect mate-copying indices, but positively affected the proportion of both males courting the female during mate-choice tests, as well as male courtship duration, the latter potentially explaining the former relationship. As expected, the sex ratio affected female choosiness positively, and Drosophila females seem to have evolved a mate-copying ability independently of sex ratio, and a capacity to adapt their choosiness to male availability. This suggests that, as in many animal species, individuals, especially females, can adapt their mate choice depending on the current sex ratio.
Effects of rumen‐protected methionine on milk production in early lactation dairy cattle fed with a diet containing 14.5% crude protein

Abstract We evaluated the influence on milk production of feeding early lactation cows a diet that included 14.5% crude protein (CP) and that did not meet methionine (Met) requirements or that met them by supplying rumen‐protected Met (RPMet). Thirty‐nine multiparous Holstein cows were allocated into two groups. For 15 weeks after calving, each group was fed one of the two total mixed rations, Control (n = 20) or Treatment (n = 19). The Treatment group received added RPMet at 0.034% (8 g/day) of the Control diet on dry matter basis. The adequacies of Met for the Control and Treatment groups were 96% and 106%, respectively, and for other amino acids, >110%. The CP level (14.5%) was 1 percentage point lower than that recommended by the Japanese Feeding Standard (2006). No between‐group differences were found in milk yield (40 kg/day), milk composition, plasma profile, rumen fermentation, nitrogen balance, or cow health. Met intake and the amount of rumen‐undegradable feed Met were higher in the Treatment group (p < 0.05). Microbial Met and total metabolizable Met did not differ between groups. Supplying RPMet in a 14.5% CP diet during early lactation did not dramatically affect milk production, because the amount of total metabolizable Met was unchanged.
Input Combination Strategies for Multi-Source Transformer Decoder

In multi-source sequence-to-sequence tasks, the attention mechanism can be modeled in several ways. This topic has been thoroughly studied on recurrent architectures. In this paper, we extend the previous work to the encoder-decoder attention in the Transformer architecture. We propose four different input combination strategies for the encoder-decoder attention: serial, parallel, flat, and hierarchical. We evaluate our methods on tasks of multimodal translation and translation with multiple source languages. The experiments show that the models are able to use multiple sources and improve over single source baselines.
Video watercolorization using bidirectional texture advection

In this paper, we present a method for creating watercolor-like animation, starting from video as input. The method involves two main steps: applying textures that simulate a watercolor appearance; and creating a simplified, abstracted version of the video to which the texturing operations are applied. Both of these steps are subject to highly visible temporal artifacts, so the primary technical contributions of the paper are extensions of previous methods for texturing and abstraction to provide temporal coherence when applied to video sequences. To maintain coherence for textures, we employ texture advection along lines of optical flow. We furthermore extend previous approaches by incorporating advection in both forward and reverse directions through the video, which allows for minimal texture distortion, particularly in areas of disocclusion that are otherwise highly problematic. To maintain coherence for abstraction, we employ mathematical morphology extended to the temporal domain, using filters whose temporal extents are locally controlled by the degree of distortions in the optical flow. Together, these techniques provide the first practical and robust approach for producing watercolor animations from video, which we demonstrate with a number of examples.
Anticipatory wireless bitrate control for blocks

We present BlockRate, a wireless bitrate adaptation algorithm designed for blocks, or large contiguous units of transmitted data, as opposed to small packets. Our work is motivated by the observation that recent research results suggest significant overhead amortization benefits of blocks. Yet state-of-the-art bitrate algorithms are optimized for adaptation on a per-packet basis, so they can either have the amortization benefits of blocks or high responsiveness to underlying channel conditions of packets, but not both. To bridge this disparity, BlockRate employs multiple bitrates within a block that are predictive of future channel conditions. In each feedback round, BlockRate uses a history-based scheme to predict the SNR for packets within the next block. In slow-changing scenarios as under pedestrian mobility, BlockRate uses a simple linear regression model to predict the SNR trend over the next block. In fast-changing scenarios as under vehicular mobility, BlockRate uses a path loss model to capture more significant SNR variations within a block. We have implemented a prototype of BlockRate in a commodity 802.11 driver and evaluated it via deployment on an indoor mesh testbed as well as an outdoor vehicular testbed. Our evaluation shows that BlockRate achieves up to 1.4× and 2.8× improvement in goodput under indoor and outdoor mobility respectively.
Candida Interactions with the Oral Bacterial Microbiota

The human oral cavity is normally colonized by a wide range of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, Archaea, viruses, and protozoa. Within the different oral microenvironments these organisms are often found as part of highly organized microbial communities termed biofilms, which display consortial behavior. Formation and maintenance of these biofilms are highly dependent on the direct interactions between the different members of the microbiota, as well as on the released factors that influence the surrounding microbial populations. These complex biofilm dynamics influence oral health and disease. In the latest years there has been an increased recognition of the important role that interkingdom interactions, in particular those between fungi and bacteria, play within the oral cavity. Candida spp. , and in particular C. albicans, are among the most important fungi colonizing the oral cavity of humans and have been found to participate in these complex microbial oral biofilms. C. albicans has been reported to interact with individual members of the oral bacterial microbiota, leading to either synergistic or antagonistic relationships. In this review we describe some of the better characterized interactions between Candida spp. and oral bacteria.
Reclamation of Marine Chitinous Materials for Chitosanase Production via Microbial Conversion by Paenibacillus macerans

Chitinous materials from marine byproducts elicit great interest among biotechnologists for their potential biomedical or agricultural applications. In this study, four kinds of marine chitinous materials (squid pens, shrimp heads, demineralized shrimp shells, and demineralized crab shells) were used to screen the best source for producing chitosanase by Paenibacillus macerans TKU029. Among them, the chitosanase activity was found to be highest in the culture using the medium containing squid pens as the sole carbon/nitrogen (C/N) source. A chitosanase which showed molecular weights at 63 kDa was isolated from P. macerans cultured on a squid pens medium. The purified TKU029 chitosanase exhibited optimum activity at 60 °C and pH 7, and was stable at temperatures under 50 °C and pH 3-8. An analysis by MALDI-TOF MS revealed that the chitosan oligosaccharides (COS) obtained from the hydrolysis of water-soluble chitosan by TKU029 crude enzyme showed various degrees of polymerization (DP), varying from 3–6. The obtained COS enhanced the growth of four lactic acid bacteria strains but exhibited no effect on the growth of E. coli. By specialized growth enhancing effects, the COS produced from hydrolyzing water soluble chitosan with TKU029 chitinolytic enzymes could have potential for use in medicine or nutraceuticals.
An Evaluation of Clinical and Histopathological Aspects of Patients with Oral Submucous Fibrosis in the Background of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background The behavior and prognosis of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is presumably different in patients with oral submucous fibrosis (OSF). The objective of this study was to assess the effects of demographic features, habits, and histopathological features in the transformation of OSF to OSCC. Methods Data were extracted from the archives and histopathological evaluation and presence of nodal metastasis were recorded. Results OSF was detected in 130 (48%) out of 273 OSCC patients. The mean age of presentation among OSF-positive patients was 57.7 years, while patients diagnosed only with OSCC had a comparatively higher age, 59.5 years. In the below 50 years of age group, presence of OSF with OSCC was less (40%). In the OSF-positive group, male to female ratio was 3.2:1. The common primary sites were buccal mucosa and tongue in both groups. Betel quid chewing was present in more than 95% of the sample. Betel chewing, smoking, and alcohol consumption were present in 26.15% of OSF-positive patients. Degree of fibrosis was neither associated with the level of histological differentiation of the tumor (p= 0.195) nor associated with the malignant transformation (p =0.373). Lymph node metastasis was not seen in 76.63% and 68.54% of the patients with and without OSF, respectively. Conclusions High degree of prevalence of OSF was observed among the OSCC patients. There were also a male predilection and younger age at presentation in these patients. However, a significant association was not observed in the degree of fibrosis with malignant transformation or the level of histopathological differentiation of the tumor. Lymph node metastasis also failed to express a significant relationship with the presence of OSF.
Experience with uncrossmatched blood refrigerator in emergency department

Background Uncrossmatched packed red blood cell (PRBC) transfusion is fundamental in resuscitation of hemorrhagic shock. Ready availability of uncrossmatched blood can be achieved by storing uncrossmatched blood in a blood bank refrigerator in the emergency department (ED), but could theoretically lead to inappropriate uncrossmatched use. Methods This retrospective study was performed at a level I trauma center from January 2013 to March 2014. Possibly inappropriate transfusion was defined as patients who received at least one unit of blood from the ED refrigerator and no more than two units of PRBC in the first 24 hours. Deaths within the first 24 hours were excluded. Patients who received blood from the ED refrigerator who received ≤2 units total in 24 hours were compared with those who received >2 units. Results 158 adults received blood from the ED refrigerator. 140 (88.6%) were trauma patients. 37 (23.4%) received massive transfusion (MT). 42 (26.6%) deaths were excluded. 29 patients received ≤2 units and 87 received >2 units in the first 24 hours. The ≤2 units group had a higher systolic blood pressure (116 mm Hg vs. 102 mm Hg, p=0.042), lower base deficit (6.4 mEq/L vs. 9.4 mEq/L, p=0.032), higher hematocrit (34% vs. 30%, p=0.024), lower rate of MT protocol activation (27.6% vs. 58.6%, p=0.005), and lower rates of transfusion of fresh frozen plasma (17.2% vs. 54.0%, p=0.001) and platelets (13.8% vs. 39.1%, p=0.012). Appropriately transfused patients were more likely to have evidence of shock with active, non-compressible hemorrhage. Potentially inappropriate uses were more likely in patients either without evidence of hemorrhage or without signs of shock. Discussion Storing uncrossmatched blood in the ED is an effective way to get PRBCs transfused quickly in hemorrhaging patients and is associated with a low rate of unnecessary uncrossmatched transfusion. Provider education and good clinical judgment are imperative to prevent unnecessary use. Level of evidence Level III, therapeutic.