Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weaving a carpet from log entries: A network security visualization built with co-creation

We created a pixel map for multivariate data based on an analysis of the needs of network security engineers. Parameters of a log record are shown as pixels and these pixels are stacked to represent a record. This allows a broad view of a data set on one screen while staying very close to the raw data and to expose common and rare patterns of user behavior through the visualization itself (the "Carpet"). Visualizations that immediately point to areas of suspicious activity without requiring extensive filtering, help network engineers investigating unknown computer security incidents. Most of them, however, have limited knowledge of advanced visualization techniques, while many designers and data scientists are unfamiliar with computer security topics. To bridge this gap, we developed visualizations together with engineers, following a co-creative process. We will show how we explored the scope of the engineers' tasks and how we jointly developed ideas and designs. Our expert evaluation indicates that this visualization helps to scan large parts of log files quickly and to define areas of interest for closer inspection.
Methanogenesis from Methanol at Low Temperatures by a Novel Psychrophilic Methanogen, “Methanolobus psychrophilus” sp. nov., Prevalent in Zoige Wetland of the Tibetan Plateau

ABSTRACT The Zoige wetland of the Tibetan plateau is at permanent low temperatures and is a methane emission heartland of the plateau; however, cold-adaptive methanogens in the soil are poorly understood. In this study, a variety of methanogenic enrichments at 15°C and 30°C were obtained from the wetland soil. It was demonstrated that hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis was the most efficient type at 30°C, while methanol supported the highest methanogenesis rate at 15°C. Moreover, methanol was the only substrate to produce methane more efficiently at 15°C than at 30°C. A novel psychrophilic methanogen, strain R15, was isolated from the methanol enrichment at 15°C. Phylogenetic analysis placed strain R15 within the genus Methanolobus, loosely clustered with Methanolobus taylorii (96.7% 16S rRNA similarity). R15 produced methane from methanol, trimethylamine, and methyl sulfide and differed from other Methanolobus species by growing and producing methane optimally at 18°C (specific growth rate of 0.063 ± 0.001 h−1) and even at 0°C. Based on these characteristics, R15 was proposed to be a new species and named “Methanolobus psychrophilus” sp. nov. The Km and Vmax of R15 for methanol conversion were determined to be 87.5 ± 0.4 μM and 0.39 ± 0.04 mM h−1 at 18°C, respectively, indicating a high affinity and conversion efficiency for methanol. The proportion of R15 in the soil was determined by quantitative PCR, and it accounted for 17.2% ± 2.1% of the total archaea, enumerated as 107 per gram of soil; the proportion was increased to 42.4% ± 2.3% in the methanol enrichment at 15°C. This study suggests that the psychrophilic methanogens in the Zoige wetland are likely to be methylotrophic and to play a role in methane emission of the wetland.
Inhibitory Effects of Oolong Tea Extract on Caries–Inducing Properties of Mutans Streptococci

The inhibitory effects of oolong tea extract (OTE) on the caries–inducing properties of mutans streptococci were examined in vitro. OTE reduced the rate of acid production by mutans streptococci accompanied with the retardation of growth rate of mutans streptococci, while the action by chromatographically isolated oolong tea polyphenol (OTF6) was weak. On the other hand, both oolong tea products decreased cell surface hydrophobicity of almost all the oral streptococci examined in the present study, and also induced cellular aggregation of Streptococcus mutans, Streptococcus oralis, Streptococcus sanguis or Streptococcus gordonii. In these reactions, OTF6 showed a more pronounced activity than OTE. Furthermore, the oolong tea products inhibited the adherence of mutans streptococci to saliva–coated hydroxyapatite. These results suggest that OTF6 may inhibit bacterial adherence to the tooth surfaces by reducing the hydrophobicity of mutans streptococci, and OTE may inhibit caries–inducing activity of mutans streptococci by reducing the rate of acid production.
The Importance of School Systems: Evidence from International Differences in Student Achievement

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school – socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This essay argues that differences in features of countries' school systems, and in particular their institutional structures, account for a substantial part of the cross-country variation in student achievement. It first documents the size and cross-test consistency of international differences in student achievement. Next, it uses the framework of an education production function to provide descriptive analysis of the extent to which different factors of the school system, as well as factors beyond the school system, account for cross-country achievement differences. Finally, it covers research that goes beyond descriptive associations by addressing leading concerns of bias in cross-country analysis. The available evidence suggests that differences in expenditures and class size play a limited role in explaining cross-country achievement differences, but that differences in teacher quality and instruction time do matter. This suggests that what matters is not so much the amount of inputs that school systems are endowed with, but rather how they use them. Correspondingly, international differences in institutional structures of school systems such as external exams, school autonomy, private competition, and tracking have been found to be important sources of international differences in student achievement.
Fine-grain access control for distributed shared memory

This paper discusses implementations of fine-grain memory access control, which selectively restricts reads and writes to cache-block-sized memory regions. Fine-grain access control forms the basis of efficient cache-coherent shared memory. This paper focuses on low-cost implementations that require little or no additional hardware. These techniques permit efficient implementation of shared memory on a wide range of parallel systems, thereby providing shared-memory codes with a portability previously limited to message passing. This paper categorizes techniques based on where access control is enforced and where access conflicts are handled. We incorporated three techniques that require no additional hardware into Blizzard, a system that supports distributed shared memory on the CM-5. The first adds a software lookup before each shared-memory reference by modifying the program's executable. The second uses the memory's error correcting code (ECC) as cache-block valid bits. The third is a hybrid. The software technique ranged from slightly faster to two times slower than the ECC approach. Blizzard's performance is roughly comparable to a hardware shared-memory machine. These results argue that clusters of workstations or personal computers with networks comparable to the CM-5's will be able to support the same shared-memory interfaces as supercomputers.
Linear torque actuation using FPGA-controlled Magneto-Rheological actuators

In recent years, Magneto-Rheological (MR) clutches have been increasingly used for realizing compliant actuation. One difficulty in using MR clutches is the existence of nonlinear hysteretic behaviors between the input current and output torque of an MR clutch. In this paper, a new closed-loop, Field-Programable-Gate-Array (FPGA) based control scheme to linearize an MR clutch's input-output relationship is presented. The feedback signal used in this control scheme is the magnetic field acquired from hall sensors within the MR clutch. The FPGA board uses this feedback signal to compensate for the nonlinear behavior of the MR clutch using an estimated model of the clutch magnetic field. The local use of an FPGA board will dramatically simplify the use of MR clutches for torque actuation. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is validated using an experimental platform that includes an MR clutch as part of a compliant actuation mechanism. The results clearly demonstrate that the use of the FPGA based closed-loop control scheme can effectively eliminate hysteretic behaviors of the MR clutch, allowing to have linear actuators with predictable behaviors.
Advisory Firm Employee Ownership and Performance in Separately Managed Accounts

Advisory Firm Employee Ownership and Performance in Separately Managed Accounts by Samuel White Yates April 2017 Chair: Conrad Ciccotello Major Academic Unit: Finance I describe in detail the structure of separately managed accounts (SMAs) and how those accounts compare to and differ from mutual funds and hedge funds. I then examine how employee ownership of advisory firms — that is, firms in which employees have partnership or stock interests — affects the performance, idiosyncratic risk, and R-square of each firm’s SMA portfolios. In testing 14,484 different portfolios from more than 1,100 different advisory firms from 1995 to 2015, I find that SMAs at firms with employee ownership outperform SMAs at firms without it. The greatest impact is in the 25–50% employee-ownership range. Positive returns, risk, and R all decrease as employee ownership increases beyond 50%, but SMA performance levels remain above those of firms in which the portfolio manager has no employee ownership. I also find that the Sharpe ratio is negatively related to employee ownership, reflecting a deterioration of risk-adjusted returns at higher employee-ownership levels. These results suggest both that the presence of advisor employee ownership is a significant, positive indicator for SMA performance and that those advisory firms assume more idiosyncratic risk to achieve
A Case for Time Slotted Channel Hopping for ICN in the IoT

Recent proposals to simplify the operation of the IoT include the use of Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigms. While this is promising, several challenges remain. In this paper, our core contributions (a) leverage ICN communication patterns to dynamically optimize the use of TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping), a wireless link layer technology increasingly popular in the IoT, and (b) make IoT-style routing adaptive to names, resources, and traffic patterns throughout the network--both without cross-layering. Through a series of experiments on the FIT IoT-LAB interconnecting typical IoT hardware, we find that our approach is fully robust against wireless interference, and almost halves the energy consumed for transmission when compared to CSMA. Most importantly, our adaptive scheduling prevents the time-slotted MAC layer from sacrificing throughput and delay.
THE NEWS HOUR : ESTIMATING THE VALUE OF TELEVISION NEWS

We model television station program choices as a discrete game of complete information played between local stations in a two-sided market. We estimate the model with program-level data on viewing, advertising and programming during the evening news hours over one week in 2010 to characterize the efficiency of local news provision from the perspective of viewers, advertisers, and stations. Our results suggest that from the perspective of viewers, news broadcasts are close substitutes for each other and other programs types. Advertiser demand for local news viewers is lower and more elastic than for viewers of non-news programs. Welfare simulations indicate that local news is oversupplied to a small degree in most markets from the perspective of viewers and advertisers, while some under-provision exists for stations. We offer examples of how these inefficiencies arise from business stealing effects. 1 Matthew J. Baker, Department of Economics, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave., New York, NY 10065. Email: mjbaker@hunter.cuny. edu. 2 Lisa M. George, Department of Economics, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave., New York, NY 10065. Email: lisa.george@hunter.cuny. edu.
A language modeling based on a hierarchical approach: m_n^v

In this work, we introduce the concept of hierarchical M n language model and we compare it to the based class multigram and interpolated class n-gram model. The originality of our approach is its capability to parse a string of class/tags into variable length dependent sequences. A few experimental tests were carried out on a class corpus extracted from the French “Le Monde” word corpus labeled automatically. In our experiments, M n outperforms based class multigram and interpolated class bigram but are comparable to the interpolated class trigram model.
Temporal Variations in Phytoplankton Assemblages at Dol Net Fishing Grounds of Major Tidal Creeks of Maharashtra, India

Tidal creeks are funnel-shaped dynamic coastal ecosystems affected by ebbing and flooding of ocean tides and characterised by continuous flushing, mixing and replenishment of nutrients (Dalrymple, 1992; Semeniuk, 1996). Moreover, these habitats support unique flora and fauna, including migrants and residents of various aquatic species (Sreekanth et al., 2016). In Maharashtra, 48 tidal creeks have been reported (Vikas et al., 2015) and most of these creeks are rich in fish diversity and abundance which support the traditional dol net fishery. Dol nets are location-specific stationary bag nets extensively used in the tidal creeks of Maharashtra to harvest fish. Fish production in the coastal ecosystem is believed to be influenced by the variations in phytoplankton International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 7 Number 06 (2018) Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Formalising Flash Memory: First Steps

We present first steps in the construction of formal models of NAND flash memory, based on a recently emerged open standard for such devices. The model is at a level of abstraction that captures the internal architecture of such a device, as well as the commands that are used to operate it. The model is intended as a key step in a plan to develop a verified filestore system, by providing a description of the hardware devices that would be used in it implementation.
A buck DC-DC converter with a novel PWM/PFM hybrid-mode auto-change technique

A novel PWM/PFM hybrid-mode auto-change technique for buck DC-DC converter is proposed. The proposed technique utilizes the comparator propagation delay to decide the mode changing point without adding complicated PMW/PFM hybrid-mode controller. The proposed concept enables compact and simple implementation of hybrid-mode buck DC-DC converter. Simulation results show that the buck DC-DC converter can achieve seamless transition between PWM and PFM mode. The maximum efficiency of PWM and PFM mode are up to 97% and 94% respectively.
Polyangulated Specimen and Tissue Nicks to Facilitate Orientation and Re‐Excision in Mohs Micrographic Surgery

Meticulous surgical margin evaluation is critical for successful Mohs micrographic surgery (MMS). Various methods have been described to orient tissue and map positive surgical margins, including hand-drawn pictures of the specimen, preprinted maps or cartoons of anatomic sites, and digital and Polaroid photography. Tissue shrinkage and skin viscoelasticity contribute to the potential inexactness of tissue orientation and, if indicated, further resection for margin control. These tissueprocessing challenges are compounded in larger specimens, which require division into multiple tissue blocks for processing.
Population Genetic Structure of Two Forest Grasses with Contrasting Life Forms , Arundinella setosa and Garnotia tenella in Thailand

Plastid microsatellite DNA markers and Nei’s (1978) unbiased genetic distance, the unweightedpair-group method of analysis and principal components analysis were employed to assess the intraand interpopulation genetic variations of two forest grasses with contrasting breeding systems. Seven haplotypes and 4 groups from 11 populations of Arundinella setosa, and 11 haplotypes and 4 groups from 8 populations of Garnotia tenella, were defi ned. The high value of genetic diversity within the populations suggested that they consist of multiple genets and indicates nonclonality in individuals of clonally spreading A. setosa. For the annual G. tenella, it suggested that the populations are not fi xed for a plastid DNA type and that seed-mediated genefl ow is occurring. The haplotype distributions refl ect patterns of plant dispersal via seed. The low population genetic differentiations among populations (GST: Arundinella = 0.049; Garnotia = 0.155) suggested that the most variation in haplotypes is distributed within populations. The high value of genetic diversity but low gene fl ow estimates of both grasses, found in Northern Thailand, could be affected by topographical barriers and habitat fragmentation but no obvious correlations of biogeographical distribution were found that were consistent with previously defi ned Thai fl oristic regions. However, groupings in the analyses provided weak evidence for a general east-west divide.
Assessing Software Cost Estimation Models: criteria for accuracy, consistency and regression

One of the problems in software cost estimation is how to evaluate estimation models. Estimation models are usually evaluated against two attributes: estimation accuracy and estimation consistency. A number of measures are reported in the literature, but they have shortcomings. There is no generally accepted standard to evaluate estimation models and the existing measures sometimes are not consistent among themselves. This paper examines existing measures of estimation accuracy and consistency and proposes two new ones: the weighted mean of quartiles of relative errors (WMQ) as a measure of accuracy and the standard deviation of the ratios of the estimate to actual observation (SDR) as a measure of consistency. Besides, a new regression criterion is proposed to determine model parameters. The proposed measures and criterion were tested with a data set from real world software projects. Results obtained show that these new measures and criterion overcome many of the difficulties of the existing ones.
Bistability of the Atlantic overturning circulation in a global climate model and links to ocean freshwater transport

The possibility of a rapid collapse in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), with associated impacts on climate, has long been recognized. The suggested basis for this risk is the existence of two stable regimes of the AMOC (‘on’ and ‘off’), and such bistable behaviour has been identified in a range of simplified climate models. However, up to now, no state‐of‐the‐art atmosphere‐ocean coupled global climate model (AOGCM) has exhibited such behaviour, leading to the interpretation that the AMOC is more stable than simpler models indicate. Here we demonstrate AMOC bistability in the response to freshwater perturbations in the FAMOUS AOGCM ‐ the most complex AOGCM to exhibit such behaviour to date. The results also support recent suggestions that the direction of the net freshwater transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic by the AMOC may be a useful physical indicator of the existence of bistability. We also present new estimates for this net freshwater transport by the AMOC from a range of ocean reanalyses which suggest that the Atlantic AMOC is currently in a bistable regime, although with large uncertainties. More accurate observational constraints, and an improved physical understanding of this quantity, could help narrow uncertainty in the future evolution of the AMOC and to assess the risk of a rapid AMOC collapse.
Exploiting ephemeral link correlation for mobile wireless networks

In wireless mobile networks, energy can be saved by using dynamic transmission scheduling with pre-knowledge about channel conditions. Such pre-knowledge can be obtained via profiling as proposed by several existing systems which assumed that the existence of spatial link correlation makes the measured channel status at one location reusable over a long period of time. Our empirical data, however, tells a different story: spatial link correlation only maintains well within a short duration (from seconds to tens of seconds) while decreases significantly afterwards, a phenomena we call ephemeral link correlation. By leveraging this observation, we design and implement a real-time transmission scheduling system, named PreSeer, on the railway platform for cargo transportation, where the transmission of a sink (to cellular towers) can be scheduled intelligently by utilizing future channel status measured by sinks located in front of it on the same train. We have implemented and evaluated the PreSeer system on the collected data extensively over 7,000-kilometer railway routes during a period of one and half years. Results reveal that PreSeer can help save as much as 40% energy, comparing with three base-line algorithms. More importantly, lessons learned from this major effort provide useful guidelines for transmission scheduling in highly-dynamic mobile environments, where (i) channel measurements cannot be perfectly aligned due to varying vehicle velocities, and (ii) the accuracy of channel measurements is subject to hardware discrepancy as well as environment irregularity.
DNA Damage Stress and Inhibition of Jak2-V617F Cause Its Degradation and Synergistically Induce Apoptosis through Activation of GSK3β

The cytoplasmic tyrosine kinase Jak2 plays a crucial role in cytokine receptor signaling in hematopoietic cells. The activated Jak2-V617F mutant is present in most cases of BCR/ABL-negative myeloproliferative neoplasms and constitutively activates downstream signals from homodimeric cytokine receptors, such as the erythropoietin receptor (EpoR). Here we examine the effects of DNA damage stress on Jak2 or Jak2-V617F and on induction of apoptosis in hematopoietic cells. Etoposide or doxorubicin dose-dependently decreased the expression level of Jak2 in UT7 or 32D cells expressing EpoR in the absence of Epo and that of exogenously expressed Jak2-V617F in UT7 cells when cotreated with the Jak2 inhibitor JakI-1 or AG490. Studies with pharmacological inhibitors and genetic manipulations further showed that downregulation of the PI3K/Akt pathway leading to the activation of GSK3β may be involved in downregulation of Jak2 or Jak2-V617F as well as in synergistic induction of Bax activation and apoptosis. The downregulation of Jak2 was inhibited by the proteasome inhibitor MG132 or by expression of both of loss-of-function mutants of c-Cbl and Cbl-b, E3 ubiquitin ligases which facilitated ubiquitination of Jak2-V617F when co-expressed in 293T cells. The pan-caspase inhibitor Boc-d-fmk also inhibited the Jak2 downregulation as well as appearance of a 100-kDa fragment that contained the N-terminal portion of Jak2 in response to DNA damage. Together, these data suggest that DNA damage stress with simultaneous inhibition of the kinase activity causes degradation of Jak2 or Jak2-V617F by caspase cleavage and proteasomal degradation through GSK3β activation, which is closely involved in synergistic induction of apoptosis in hematopoietic cells.