Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mitigating Reordering Vulnerability of MPTCP With Transparent Proxies

Modern end-hosts are generally equipped with more than one network interfaces. IETF responded to proliferation of multi-homed end-hosts and proposed MPTCP to allow concurrent use of multiple interfaces in data transfers. Basically, MPTCP uses regular TCP flows (called as MPCTP subflows) to send/receive application data over multiple paths. This approach benefits from the strengths of TCP (e.g., its high deployment), but also suffers from its weaknesses (e.g., its vulnerability to reorderings). Scattering TCP data packets to multiple paths produces lots of reordered packets due to path delay differences. In that case, performance of MPTCP subflows decreases too much. Therefore, it is not possible to use per-packet load balancers on MPTCP subflow paths although there is a big potential to use them in current network architectures (e.g., they enable efficient utilization of network resources with low computational complexity and they decrease congestion occurences by shifting traffic to uncongested parts of networks). In this paper, we address this issue and make our previous transparent and light-weight TCP proxy proposal (ORTA, Outof-Order Robustness for TCP with Transparent ACK Intervention) MPTCP-aware. That is, ORTA now recognizes MPTCP subflows by observing the MPTCP options and makes them robust against reorderings as it made regular TCP flows. Our new proposal is called as ORTAM (ORTA with MPTCP support). ORTAM allows reorderings on MPTCP subflow paths so that access networks and/or Internet service providers (ISPs) are able to use per-packet load balancers without any concern about MPTCP performance degradation. ORTAM is implemented and tested in NS-2. In the simulation scenarios, MPTCP subflow path delays are selected to reflect real Internet path delay observations. Different levels of reorderings are generated on the MPTCP subflow paths and MPTCP performance is measured. As expected, MPTCP performance decreases sharply when regular TCP is used for MPTCP subflows and reorderings are generated on the subflow paths. On the other hand, ORTAM makes MPTCP subflows highly robust against reorderings. When ORTAM is used, MPTCP performance was unaffected by even high levels of reorderings on the MPTCP subflow paths. In addition, ORTAM supplies this reordering robustness with its transparency feature (i.e., it does not change TCP sender or receiver implementations) which makes it easy to deploy on access networks or edge ISPs.
Signaling when no one is watching: A reputation heuristics account of outrage and punishment in one-shot anonymous interactions.

Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that reputation is typically at stake, such that reputation concerns can shape moralistic outrage and punishment even in one-shot anonymous interactions. We then support this account using data from Amazon Mechanical Turk. In anonymous experiments, subjects (total n = 8,440) report more outrage in response to others' selfishness when they cannot signal their trustworthiness through direct prosociality (sharing with a third party)-such that if the interaction were not anonymous, punishment would have greater signaling value. Furthermore, mediation analyses suggest that sharing opportunities reduce outrage by decreasing reputation concerns. Additionally, anonymous experiments measuring costly punishment (total n = 6,076) show the same pattern: subjects punish more when sharing is not possible. Moreover, and importantly, moderation analyses provide some evidence that sharing opportunities do not merely reduce outrage and punishment by inducing empathy toward selfishness or hypocrisy aversion among nonsharers. Finally, we support the specific role of heuristics by investigating individual differences in deliberateness. Less deliberative individuals (who typically rely more on heuristics) are more sensitive to sharing opportunities in our anonymous punishment experiments, but, critically, not in punishment experiments where reputation is at stake (total n = 3,422); and not in our anonymous outrage experiments (where condemning is costless). Together, our results suggest that when nobody is watching, reputation cues nonetheless can shape outrage and-among individuals who rely on heuristics-costly punishment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
THE EFFECT OF THE INFORMAL ECONOMY ON POVERTY: The role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

: This study investigates how access and usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could affect the relationship between the size of the informal economy and poverty in developing countries. This topic has yet to receive much scholarly attention apart from one previous study, who argued that the moderating effect of ICTs is through the mechanism of greater financial inclusion. This thesis expands upon this argumentation by arguing that ICT also could affect this relationship by allowing information and communication improvements. This in turn is argued to increase the productivity of the informal workers by allowing them to overcome some of the limitations of informal employment, thereby influencing the poverty levels associated. To empirically test these arguments, a cross-country analysis is performed in a sample of 67 developing countries in the year 2014, using a more substantial proxy for poverty in comparison to previous research. The analysis did not show a significant effect in contrast to the previously mentioned study. The null-findings of this thesis are argued to be due to limitations in data and methodology.
Hepatitis C virus infection and non‐hepatocellular malignancies in the DAA era: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

Direct antiviral agents have greatly improved therapeutic options for chronic hepatitis C. Indeed, former “difficult‐to‐treat” patients can now be treated and can achieve sustained response. Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is associated with hepatocellular carcinoma and with B‐cell non‐Hodgkin lymphoma (B‐NHL). Other malignancies have been reported to be associated with HCV infection albeit with various grades of evidence. Antineoplastic treatment is often reduced or suspended in HCV‐positive cancer patients to avoid “HCV reactivation. ” In this setting, antiviral therapy combined with antineoplastic protocols may improve the outcome. For this reason, we conducted a systematic review and a meta‐analysis to update the association between HCV infection and non‐hepatocellular malignancies, and to shed light on the effects exerted by antiviral treatment on the natural history of oncological diseases.
Medieval State Building and Contemporary European Development Evidence from a Natural Experiment∗

The development of modern state institutions is a major legacy of the medieval period in Europe. Following existing arguments about the importance of strong state institutions for development, we conjecture a link between the success or failure of medieval state building projects and contemporary development. To substantiate this conjecture in the face of empirical challenges, we develop a theory that identifies an important source of variation in the success or failure of medieval state building efforts. During the Middle Ages, most European polities operated under a norm that gave only the close male relatives of a deceased monarch a clear place in the line of succession. When no such heirs were available, succession disputes were more likely, with more distant relatives and female(-line) heirs laying competing claims to the throne. These disputes often produced violent conflicts that destroyed existing state institutions and stunted the subsequent development of the state. We thus hypothesize that the unavailability of male heirs to Europe’s monarchies in the period 1000-1500AD has a deleterious effect on contemporary development levels across European regions. We confirm this hypothesis by showing that regions that were less likely to have an abundance of such heirs are today poorer than other areas. Our results highlight the importance of the medieval period in European development, and the role of random, contingent factors in shaping development trajectories. JEL Classification Codes: O10, N13
Automated Visual Monitoring of Nocturnal Insects with Light-based Camera Traps

Automatic camera-assisted monitoring of insects for abundance estimations is crucial to understand and counteract ongoing insect decline. In this paper, we present two datasets of nocturnal insects, especially moths as a subset of Lepidoptera, photographed in Central Europe. One of the datasets, the EU-Moths dataset, was captured manually by citizen scientists and contains species annotations for 200 different species and bounding box annotations for those. We used this dataset to develop and evaluate a two-stage pipeline for insect detection and moth species classification in previous work. We further introduce a prototype for an automated visual monitoring system. This prototype produced the second dataset consisting of more than 27,000 images captured on 95 nights. For evaluation and bootstrapping purposes, we annotated a subset of the images with bounding boxes enframing nocturnal insects. Finally, we present first detection and classification baselines for these datasets and encourage other scientists to use this publicly available data.
A Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Question Answering on Scholarly Articles

The number of research articles is increasing exponentially. It has become difﬁcult for researchers to stay updated with the latest development in science with the deluge of papers. Hence, keeping abreast with the current literature is one of the most signiﬁcant challenges to present-day researchers. However, if one can query a scientiﬁc article, they can quickly comprehend it and elicit the required information. Hence, a question-answering (QA) sys-tem on scholarly articles would be a helpful assistant for researchers to survey the literature. Recently logic-infused deep networks have been showing good promise for solving several downstream NLP tasks. Here in this paper, we implement a neural network-based symbolic approach for QA on scholarly articles. We incorporate logical boolean functions into the deep network, signiﬁcantly improving the model’s performance without additional parameters. Further, we reduce the dependency on domain-speciﬁc training data by using ex-ternal knowledge from the ConceptNet. We perform our experiments on the benchmark ScholarlyRead dataset and achieve signiﬁcant performance improvement ( ∼ double) over the baseline approach. We would make our code-base available here 1 .
Isolation and identification of bacteria and fungi associated with tomatoes

Lycopersicum esculentum (Tomato) is an important vegetable crop widely grown around the world. Their water content makes them susceptible to spoilage. This study was carried out to isolate, identify and characterize the bacteria and fungi associated with fresh and paste tomatoes collected from Oja-Oba Market in Ado-Ekiti. Standard microbiological protocols were followed in isolation, cultivation and biochemical identification of microorganisms. Bacteria identified included Listeria monocytogenes, Bacillus subtilis, Lactobacillus fermenti, Pseudomonas stutzeri and Rothia sp. While the fungi identified included Penicillum notatum, Saccharomyces sp. , Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus flavus, Mucor mucedo, Aspergillus fumigatus and Rhizopus stolonifer. The mineral composition showed that potassium had the highest concentration; 642.230. 18 mg/kg while lead showed the least concentration; 0.0010. 00 mg/kg. Chemical properties revealed that moisture in fresh tomatoes had the highest concentration of 90.460. 14% and fat had the lowest concentration in fresh tomatoes; 0.820. 02%. The phytochemical of tomato extracts in qualitative screening showed Alkaloid and phenol are most present while the quantitative screening showed that phenol had the highest concentration; 33.360. 00 mg/g and Anthraquinones showed the lowest concentration; 0.020. 002 mg/g. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification was done using gene primers GC-Clamp-EUB f933 and EUB r1389 for bacteria while GMF1 and GMF2 primer were used for fungi with 100bp (base pair) ladder molecular weight marker. This work revealed Rothia sp. as the highest occurring bacteria and Aspergillus fumigatus for fungi. The isolates produce toxins and hereby pose a potential risk to consumers; keeping fresh tomatoes in an uncontrolled environment for about three days or more is not safe for human consumption and this could lead to food poisoning and food-borne illness.
Head Teachers’ Supervisory Practices and Its Effectiveness on Teachers’ Job Performance in Public Primary Schools in Arusha District Council, Tanzania

: The study investigated Head teachers’ supervisory practices and its effectiveness on teachers’ job performance in public primary schools in Arusha District Council, Tanzania. Convergent mixed methods design was employed while questionnaires and interview guide were used for data collection. The sample size of 10 Head teachers, 10 Academic teachers and 136 Teachers of public primary schools were involved in the study. The Head teachers were selected by using purposive sampling technique while for academic teachers and class teachers the researchers employed simple and stratified random sampling techniques. The university experts evaluated the instruments to determine content validity. Reliability of the questionnaires were tested through test-retest in a pilot study and the coefficient was found to correlate at Cronbach Alpha QAT, r = 0.85 and QT, at r = 0.85. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics in the SPSS version 20 and results were presented in tables of frequencies and percentages. Qualitative data was analyzed thematically alongside the research questions and presented in narrative forms. Supervision of curriculum implementation, education policy, human, material and financial resources were found to be Head teachers’ supervisory practices. Moreover, the effectiveness of supervisory practice on teachers’ job performance is exhibited in good job performance, Proper time management, improved academic outcome of students and improved teachers’ abilities in their professional growth. Head teachers in public primary schools should carry out supervision in a friendly environment.
Cardiovascular risk assessment among rural population in Russian Federation: A case study of Irkutsk region

Sergey Glushkov1*, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7464-1343, Yuliya Varavko2, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9983-339X, Tatyana Maksikova2 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3519-9980 1I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow, Russian Federation 2Irkutsk state medical university, Irkutsk, Russian Federation; *corresponding author: Sergey Glushkov, I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow, Russian Federation, Email: sergey.glushkov@yahoo.com
Functional outcomes and health-related quality of life following curative treatment for rectal cancer: A population-level study in England

This large-scale population-level study investigated functional outcomes and health-related quality of life (HRQL) 12-36 months after curative rectal cancer treatment using linked survey and administrative data. We observed that patients who received pre-operative radiotherapy reported clinically and statistically significantly worse bowel and sexual function compared to patients who had surgery alone. Patients who received short-course radiotherapy reported worse bowel control than those who had long-course chemoradiotherapy. Patients with a stoma reported more sexual difficulties and worse HRQL outcomes. Abstract Background: There is a growing population of cancer survivors at risk of treatment-related morbidity. This study investigates how potentially curative rectal cancer treatment influences subsequent function and health-related quality of life (HRQL) using data from a large-scale survey of patient-reported outcomes. Methods: All individuals 12-36 months post-diagnosis of colorectal cancer in England were sent a survey in January 2013. The survey responses were linked with cancer registration, hospital admissions and radiotherapy data through the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service. Outcome measures were cancer-specific (FACT and Social Difficulties Inventory items related to faecal incontinence, urinary incontinence and sexual difficulties) and generic (EQ-5D). Results: Surveys were returned by 6,713 (64.2%) of 10,452 rectal cancer patients. 3,998 were in remission after a major resection and formed the final analysis sample. Compared to those who had surgery alone, patients who received pre-operative radiotherapy had higher odds of reporting poor bowel control (43.6% vs. 33.0%; OR=1.55, 95%CI 1.26-1.91), severe urinary leakage (7.2% vs. 3.5%; OR=1.69, 95%CI 1.18-2.43) and severe sexual difficulties (34.4% vs. 18.3%; OR=1.73, 95%CI 1.43-2.11). Patients who received long-course chemoradiotherapy reported significantly better bowel control than those who had short-course radiotherapy, with no difference for other outcomes. Respondents with a stoma present reported significantly higher levels of severe sexual difficulties and worse HRQL compared to those who had never had a stoma or had undergone reversal. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the feasibility of a large-scale assessment of patient-reported outcomes and provides ‘real world’ data regarding the impact of rectal cancer treatment. The results show that patients who receive pre-operative radiotherapy report poorer outcomes, particularly for bowel and sexual function, and highlight the negative impact of a stoma. We hope that our experience will encourage researchers to perform similar studies in other healthcare systems. dysfunction), the results show 25.9% of
COMPARATIVE ORGANIZATION OF OPTIC LOBES IN CRUSTACEANS: HEMIGRAPSUS NUDUS

The common structure of optic neuropils connected by chiasmata has been used to propose that crustaceans and insects share a common ancestor. It was expected that comparisons of common organizations across taxa would reflect a sister group relationship between crustaceans and insects. However, recent studies revealed profound differences between the four synaptic regions across taxa, suggesting that the organization of neurons in these systems do not immediately reflect the common ancestry background. Here we describe the neuroanatomy of Hemigrapsus nudus (Malacostraca, Crustacea) focusing on optic lobe organization characterizing the medulla and lobula, the nested second and third synaptic visual centers. It is shown that unlike the equivalent region of insects, the malacostracan lobula is densely packed with columns that are distributed similarly to those in the medulla. Towards the medial side of the lobula, the dendrites converge into a thick bundle of axons that can be traced towards the midbrain. While similarities in neuronal organizations have been demonstrated to argue a monophyletic relationship between crustaceans and insects, differences in these systems could still indicate independent origins.
A study in metaphysics for free will: using models of causality, determinism and supervenience in the search for free will

We have two main aims: to construct mathematical models for analysing determinism, causality and supervenience; and then to use these to demonstrate the possibility of constructing an ontic construal of the operation of free will - one requiring both the presentation of genuine alternatives to an agent and their selecting between them in a manner that permits the attribution of responsibility. Determinism is modelled using trans-temporal ontic links between discrete juxtaposed universe states and shown to be distinct from predictability. Causality is defined on a temporal sequence of δ-algebras and quantified using a measure. The measure leads to definitions of causal overdetermination and epiphenomena. Proofs are constructed to demonstrate deterministic universes must carry their properties essentially but not necessarily locally. We argue determinism and causality are separate doctrines. These models and results are marshalled to put the case that a counterfactual construal of ontic choice cannot work. In response we propose ‘immanence’ - a modified form of indeterminism whereby a universe can present choices to its denizens. We prove that beings subsumed within a universe cannot pilot their own actions. We then argue these beings can exercise free will only when selecting between choices inhering within immanent relata. A being is responsible for its selections if and only if it is constituted of a temporally evolving deterministic substructure. Our proposal is novel: it avoids injecting indeterminism into the decision process. Topological models for property supervenience are developed and used to reconstruct standard definitions from the literature. These are then used to demonstrate considerations of supervenience do not affect our arguments. We have demonstrated that a model of the exercise of free will involving both genuine choices and responsibility is possible but can only operate within a non-deterministic universe possessing specific traits.
A review of ethnobotanical research in southern Africa

The diversity of plant species in southern Africa is matched by an equally rich cultural diversity, but traditional uses of plants have not yet been systematically recorded. Available information is fragmentary and widely dispersed in many different journals and books. A survey by Liengme (1983a) has shown several gaps in the scientific literature and some progress has been made towards a more complete record of indigenous plant use in the region. Information on some ethnic groups, such as the Khoi, Ndebele and Swazi, as well as the interaction between plants and people, folk taxonomies, plant-related mythology, ethnoveterinary medicine and pre-colonial plant use are some of the aspects that still remain poorly recorded. In contrast, ethnopharmacology — particularly the testing of biological activity of crude extracts and isolated compounds — has received considerable attention in recent years. The aim of these studies is usually to validate traditional uses rather than to provide information for product development. A review of the literature on various categories of plant use, including recent publications and some hitherto unpublished research, is presented. Ethnobotany remains an underdeveloped discipline in southern Africa and there is an urgent need to systematically document indigenous knowledge on traditional plant use before it becomes irretrievably lost to future generations.
When Do Key Audit Matters Make Sense: The Joint Effect of Familiarity, Readability and Investors’ Professional Skepticism on Information Processing and Risk Assessment

Using an eye-tracking and electrodermal device, this study investigates how readability and familarity of the Key Audit Matters (KAMs) jointly affect investors’ attention and assessment of risk associated with KAMs. We predict and find that only when investors are familiar with the information discussed in the KAM, readability will affect their visual attention to the KAMs. When investors are unfamiliar with KAMs, professional skepticism becomes the main driver of their attention allocation. Furthermore, we distinguish dedicated visual attention and absent-minded visual attention, arguing that the positive correlation only exist between dedicated visual attention on the information and the relative importance of each information in decision-making. Consistent with this argument, we prove that Why (How) Paragraph plays a more important role in risk assessment when investors are unfamiliar (familiar) with the KAM. Our results should be of interest to regulators and auditors as they consider what and how to communicate KAMs in the audit report.