Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PHANTOM: practical oblivious computation in a secure processor

We introduce PHANTOM [1] a new secure processor that obfuscates its memory access trace. To an adversary who can observe the processor's output pins, all memory access traces are computationally indistinguishable (a property known as obliviousness). We achieve obliviousness through a cryptographic construct known as Oblivious RAM or ORAM. We first improve an existing ORAM algorithm and construct an empirical model for its trusted storage requirement. We then present PHANTOM, an oblivious processor whose novel memory controller aggressively exploits DRAM bank parallelism to reduce ORAM access latency and scales well to a large number of memory channels. Finally, we build a complete hardware implementation of PHANTOM on a commercially available FPGA-based server, and through detailed experiments show that PHANTOM is efficient in both area and performance. Accessing 4KB of data from a 1GB ORAM takes 26.2us (13.5us for the data to be available), a 32x slowdown over accessing 4KB from regular memory, while SQLite queries on a population database see 1.2-6x slowdown. PHANTOM is the first demonstration of a practical, oblivious processor and can provide strong confidentiality guarantees when offloading computation to the cloud.
Determination of Paclitaxel Distribution in Solid Tumors by Nano-Particle Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry Imaging

A sensitive, simple and reproducible protocol for nanoparticle-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry imaging technique is described. The use of commercially available TiO2 nanoparticles abolishes heterogeneous crystallization, matrix background interferences and enhances signal detection, especially in the low mass range. Molecular image normalization was based on internal standard deposition on tissues, allowing direct comparison of drug penetration and distribution between different organs and tissues. The method was applied to analyze the distribution of the anticancer drug paclitaxel, inside normal and neoplastic mouse tissue sections. Spatial resolution was good, with a linear response between different in vivo treatments and molecular imaging intensity using therapeutic drug doses. This technique distinguishes the different intensity of paclitaxel distribution in control organs of mice, such as liver and kidney, in relation to the dose. Animals treated with 30 mg/kg of paclitaxel had half of the concentration of those treated with 60 mg/kg. We investigated the spatial distribution of paclitaxel in human melanoma mouse xenografts, following different dosage schedules and found a more homogeneous drug distribution in tumors of mice given repeated doses (5×8 mg/kg) plus a 60 mg/kg dose than in those assigned only a single 60 mg/kg dose. The protocol can be readily applied to investigate anticancer drug distribution in neoplastic lesions and to develop strategies to optimize and enhance drug penetration through different tumor tissues.
A Robust Online Method for Face Recognition under Illumination Invariant Conditions

In case of incremental inputs to an online face recognition with illumination invariant face samples which maximize the class-separation criterion but also incorporates the asymmetrical property of training data distributions. In this paper we alleviate this problem with an incremental learning algorithm to effectively adjust a boosted strong classifier with domain-partitioning weak hypotheses to online samples, which adopts a novel approach to efficient estimation of training losses received from offline samples. An illumination invariant face representation is obtained by extracting local binary pattern (LBP) features NIR images. The Ada-boost procedure is used to learn a powerful face recognition engine based on the invariant representation. We use Incremental linear discriminant analysis (ILDA), in case of sparse function for active near infrared (NIR) imaging system that is able to produce face images of good condition regardless of visible lights in the environment accuracy by changes in environmental illumination The experiments show convincing results of our incremental method on challenging face detection in extreme illuminations.
Increased sensitivity to cocaine by cholinergic cell ablation in nucleus accumbens

Chronic exposure to cocaine causes long-lasting behavioral changes associated with cocaine reinforcement and addiction. An important neural substrate for cocaine addiction is the nucleus accumbens (NAc), which receives dopaminergic input from the ventral tegmental area. Although the neural circuit of the NAc is controlled by several other neurotransmitters, their involvement in cocaine addiction remains elusive. In this investigation, we ablated cholinergic interneurons from the adult NAc with immunotoxin-mediated cell targeting and examined the role of acetylcholine transmitter in adaptive behavioral changes associated with cocaine reinforcement and addiction. Acute exposure to cocaine induced abnormal rotation in unilaterally cholinergic cell-eliminated mice. This abnormal turning was enhanced by repeated exposure of cocaine. In bilaterally cholinergic cell-eliminated mice, chronic cocaine administration induced a prominent and progressive increase in locomotor activity. Moreover, these mice showed robust conditioned place preference with a lower dose of cocaine, compared with wild-type littermates. This investigation demonstrates that acetylcholine in the NAc plays a key role in both acute and chronic actions of cocaine.
A BI -OBJECTIVE WORKFLOW APPLICATION SCHEDULING IN CLOUD COMPUTING SYSTEMS

The task scheduling is a key process in large-scale distributed systems like cloud computing infrastructures which can have much impressed on system performance. This problem is referred to as a NP-hard problem because of some reasons such as heterogeneous and dynamic features and dependencies among the requests. Here, we proposed a bi-objective method called DWSGA to obtain a proper solution for allocating the requests on resources. The purpose of this algorithm is to earn the response quickly, with some goal-oriented operations. At first, it makes a good initial population by a special way that uses a bidirectional tasks prioritization. Then the algorithm moves to get the most appropriate possible solution in a conscious manner by focus on optimizing the makespan, and considering a good distribution of workload on resources by using efficient parameters in the mentioned systems. Here, the experiments indicate that the DWSGA amends the results when the numbers of tasks are increased in application graph, in order to mentioned objectives. The results are compared with other studied algorithms.
A-clustering: a novel method for the detection of co-regulated methylation regions, and regions associated with exposure

MOTIVATION DNA methylation is a heritable modifiable chemical process that affects gene transcription and is associated with other molecular markers (e.g. gene expression) and biomarkers (e.g. cancer or other diseases). Current technology measures methylation in hundred of thousands, or millions of CpG sites throughout the genome. It is evident that neighboring CpG sites are often highly correlated with each other, and current literature suggests that clusters of adjacent CpG sites are co-regulated. RESULTS We develop the Adjacent Site Clustering (A-clustering) algorithm to detect sets of neighboring CpG sites that are correlated with each other. To detect methylation regions associated with exposure, we propose an analysis pipeline for high-dimensional methylation data in which CpG sites within regions identified by A-clustering are modeled as multivariate responses to environmental exposure using a generalized estimating equation approach that assumes exposure equally affects all sites in the cluster. We develop a correlation preserving simulation scheme, and study the proposed methodology via simulations. We study the clusters detected by the algorithm on high dimensional dataset of peripheral blood methylation of pesticide applicators. AVAILABILITY We provide the R package Aclust that efficiently implements the A-clustering and the analysis pipeline, and produces analysis reports. The package is found on http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/tamar-sofer/packages/ CONTACT tsofer@hsph.harvard.edu
Transient overexpression of DNA adenine methylase enables efficient and mobile genome engineering with reduced off-target effects

Homologous recombination of single-stranded oligonucleotides is a highly efficient process for introducing precise mutations into the genome of E. coli and other organisms when mismatch repair (MMR) is disabled. This can result in the rapid accumulation of off-target mutations that can mask desired phenotypes, especially when selections need to be employed following the generation of combinatorial libraries. While the use of inducible mutator phenotypes or other MMR evasion tactics have proven useful, reported methods either require non-mobile genetic modifications or costly oligonucleotides that also result in reduced efficiencies of replacement. Therefore a new system was developed, Transient Mutator Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (TM-MAGE), that solves problems encountered in other methods for oligonucleotide-mediated recombination. TM-MAGE enables nearly equivalent efficiencies of allelic replacement to the use of strains with fully disabled MMR and with an approximately 12- to 33-fold lower off-target mutation rate. Furthermore, growth temperatures are not restricted and a version of the plasmid can be readily removed by sucrose counterselection. TM-MAGE was used to combinatorially reconstruct mutations found in evolved salt-tolerant strains, enabling the identification of causative mutations and isolation of strains with up to 75% increases in growth rate and greatly reduced lag times in 0.6 M NaCl.
Multi-Campus Colleges in South Africa: Challenging Capabilities of Principals in Managing Institutional Transformation

Mergers, institutional reorganisation and the establishment of a network of multi-campus colleges in South Africa has served as a major policy trajectory to transform the post-schooling education and training sub-system under the current democratic dispensation. The changes have had a fundamental impact on the leadership capabilities of college principals and their management teams. This article draws upon findings of the training needs assessment study conducted in 2012 in the Further Education and Training colleges. From a systems thinking approach, the study tries to locate leadership development within the context of policies that undergird transformation. The study used the mixed method of inquiry and data were collected through questionnaires, focus group discussions and document analysis. A purposive sampling procedure was followed. The findings reveal an urgent need to equip managers with essential competences to lead effectively in a complex environment of constant change. The article concludes by suggesting integrating continuing professional development in the overall strategy of change and transformation, using learning communities as a mechanism to sustain effective leadership in the long-term. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014. v5n14p394
A Generalized Fast Subset Sums Framework for Bayesian Event Detection

We present Generalized Fast Subset Sums (GFSS), a new Bayesian framework for scalable and accurate detection of irregularly shaped spatial clusters using multiple data streams. GFSS extends the previously proposed Multivariate Bayesian Scan Statistic (MBSS) and Fast Subset Sums (FSS) approaches for detection of emerging events. The detection power of MBSS is primarily limited by computational considerations, which limit it to searching over circular spatial regions. GFSS enables more accurate and timely detection by defining a hierarchical prior over all subsets of the N locations, first selecting a local neighborhood consisting of a center location and its neighbors, and introducing a sparsity parameter p to describe how likely each location in the neighborhood is to be affected. This approach allows us to consider all possible subsets of locations (including irregularly-shaped regions) but also puts higher weight on more compact regions. We demonstrate that MBSS and FSS are both special cases of this general framework (assuming p = 1 and p = 0.5 respectively), but substantially higher detection power can be achieved by choosing an appropriate value of p. Thus we show that the distribution of the sparsity parameter p can be accurately learned from a small number of labeled events. Our evaluation results (on synthetic disease outbreaks injected into real-world hospital data) show that the GFSS method with learned sparsity parameter has higher detection power and spatial accuracy than MBSS and FSS, particularly when the affected region is irregular or elongated. We also show that the learned models can be used for event characterization, accurately distinguishing between two otherwise identical event types based on the sparsity of the affected spatial region.
Emotions, narrative and change

There is a wide agreement that emotions are central to the evaluation and understanding of change processes in psychotherapy. Unfortunately, most of the debate on the role of emotions has been influenced by the reductionist view of ‘psychophysiological symbolism’ (Averill 1996). We defend the position that, in order to understand their role in psychotherapy fully, we need to move in the direction of a more complex view of emotions. This paper presents a view of emotionsas social constructed phenomena operating via language and narrative. We present research suggesting that these narratives may be an essential process for understanding psychological disorders, how these disorders are developed and, finally, how they can be changed.
One-dimensional electromechanical equivalent circuit for piezoelectric array elements

In this paper, we report a simple one — dimensional electromechanical method to model piezoelectric transducer array elements well known by slender bar elements. The method is inspired from the Mason's simplified model, which is tested in the case of a piezoelectric plate and extended to a rectangular slender bar. The research work investigates the effects of the material parameters on the electroacoustic performances i.e. on the electrical impedance and the displacement. Firstly, it compares the performances of a piezoelectric plate obtained experimentally and those calculated from the equivalent circuit. Two approaches are tested: the first method consists on the determination of the circuit components from the manufacturer parameters and the second one deduces them from the measured electrical impedance. The second approach is then tested in the case of a piezoelectric rectangular slender bar similar to those constituting the medical transducer arrays. In this case, the electrical impedance and the displacement obtained are very close to the measured ones, especially around the resonance frequency. The same approach will be used to study a complete transducer array i.e. taking into account all the elements, the filling material, the matching layers and the backing. This constitutes the objective of our future works.
Trends of Asthma Mortality in Galicia from 1993 to 2007

Introduction. In the past few years, deaths due to asthma appear to decrease at least in Western countries; but there are significant variations between populations. The aim of this study is to describe the trends in deaths due to asthma between 1993 and 2007 in our community and to analyze any factors associated with this. Methods. All cases, which had asthma as a cause of death, were included in the study. The mortality data were obtained from the official death certificate from the Deaths Register. Mortality relative risk, based on the calendar year, sociodemographic variables (age and gender), seasons, and days of the week, were estimated using a Poisson generalized linear model with a log-link. Results. In the 15 years of the study period, a total of 1180 people had died due to asthma, mainly in winter (34.5%), women (64.5%), and advanced age (65 years or above; 84.6%). A tendency of decreased mortality in all age groups was observed during the period of the study, which was significant in both the sexes in the 35- to 64-year-old age group, and in males above 65 years. Conclusion. Death due to asthma is changing favorably in our community, with a tendency to decrease in the past few years. Advanced age, being female, and the winter period are associated with a higher mortality rate due to asthma.
Context Variations and Pluri-methodological Issues concerning the Expression of a Social Representation: the Example of the Gypsy Community

Abstract Within the social representations’ field of research, the “mute zone” hypothesis considers that some objects are characterized by counternormative content that people usually do not express in standard conditions of production. Within the framework of this approach, this study aims to explore the variations in the expression about the Gypsy community following the manipulation of different contexts and the issues associated with a pluri-methodological approach of data analysis. Indeed, two methodologies have been combined. The participants were asked to express themselves in public or in private. In addition, the identity of the experimenter was also manipulated as she presented herself as a Gypsy or not. Then, through a set of analyses based on a methodological triangulation approach, we were able to observe a recurrent modulation of the participants’ answers. These analyses highlighted a greater incidence of the expression of counternormative elements when the context of expression was private and especially when the experimenter did not present herself as a Gypsy (p < .01, η p ² = .06). These results will be discussed in terms of the contribution of the methodologies employed and their comparison within the framework of the study of counternormative content.
Comprehensive isomorphic subtree enumeration

A fundamental problem in program analysis and optimization concerns the discovery of structural similarities between different sections of a given program and/or across different programs. Specifically, there is a need to find topologically identical segments within compiler intermediate representations (IRs). Such topological isomorphism has many applications. For example, finding isomorphic sub-trees within different expression trees points to common computational resources that can be shared when targeting application-specific hardware. Isomorphism in the controlflow graph can be used to discovery of custom instructions for customizable processors. Discovering isomorphism in context call trees during program execution is invaluable to several JIT compiler optimizations. Thus, all these different applications rely on the fundamental ability to find topologically identical segments within a given tree or graph representation. In this paper, we present a generic formulation of the subtree isomorphism problem that is more powerful than previous proposals. We prove that an optimal quadratic time solution exists for this problem. We employ a dynamic programming based algorithm to efficiently enumerate all isomorphic sub-trees within given reference trees and also demonstrate its efficacy in a production compiler.
Does Fast Defensive Line Speed Influence Tackling Proficiency in Collision Sport Athletes?

This study investigated the influence of increased line speed on tackling proficiency in collision-sport athletes. Eleven collision-sport athletes (mean ± SD age, 25.5 ± 4.7 yr) underwent a one-on-one tackling drill in a 10 m grid Video footage was taken from the rear, side and front of the defending player. In random order, players underwent a self-paced tackling assessment (i.e., slow-moderate speed) and a tackling assessment with enforced line-speed (i.e., fast speed). Tackling proficiency was assessed using standardised technical criteria. Movement speed into the contact zone was significantly faster (p < 0.05, effect size, ES = 2.00) in the enforced line-speed (3.8 ± 0.3 m/s) condition than the self-paced (3.2 ± 0.3 m/s) line-speed condition. Fast line-speed significantly reduced (p < 0.05, ES = 1.00) the tackling proficiency of players, with tackling players having a reduced ability to maintain a square/aligned body position (p < 0.05, ES = 1.18), make initial contact with the shoulder (p < 0.05, ES = 0.77), and watch the target onto the shoulder (p < 0.05, ES = 0.61). Moderate effect size differences (p > 0.05, ES = 0.51) were detected between the self-paced and enforced line-speed conditions for the ability of players to contact the target in the centre of gravity. The results of this study demonstrate that fast line-speed reduces tackling proficiency in collision-sport athletes. Coaches employing defensive strategies that rely on fast line-speed should also ensure to practice effective tackling technique under these conditions.
Multi-Level Alignments As An Extensible Representation Basis for Textual Entailment Algorithms

A major problem in research on Textual Entailment (TE) is the high implementation effort for TE systems. Recently, interoperable standards for annotation and preprocessing have been proposed. In contrast, the algorithmic level remains unstandardized, which makes component re-use in this area very difficult in practice. In this paper, we introduce multi-level alignments as a central, powerful representation for TE algorithms that encourages modular, reusable, multilingual algorithm development. We demonstrate that a pilot open-source implementation of multi-level alignment with minimal features competes with state-of-theart open-source TE engines in three languages.
Inside and out: Forms of address in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters

This article focuses on socio-pragmatic aspects of address forms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century personal letters in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) by comparing the forms found inside and on the outside of a letter. In addition to providing a wider social perspective, the research questions concern the private and public aspects of address formulae and the influence of different participant roles of the writer and the recipient. Address forms are analysed using Bell’s (1984, 2001) audience design model, as well as Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness. The study shows that formulae inside a letter are mainly governed by relative power in the relationship between the writer and the recipient. Address in superscriptions, on the other hand, seems to be the result of taking into consideration both the addressee and the audience with its possible opinions and reactions.