Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parametric and probabilistic model checking of confidentiality in data dispersal algorithms

Recent developments in cloud storage architectures have originated new models of online storage as cooperative storage systems and interconnected clouds. Such distributed environments involve many organizations, thus ensuring confidentiality becomes crucial: only legitimate clients should recover the information they distribute among storage nodes. In this work we present a unified framework for verifying confidentiality of dispersal algorithms against probabilistic models of intruders. Two models of intruders are given, corresponding to different types of attackers: one aiming at intercepting as many slices of information as possible, and the other aiming at attacking the storage providers in the network. Both try to recover the original information, given the intercepted slices. By using probabilistic model checking, we can measure the degree of confidentiality of the system exploring exhaustively all possible behaviors. Our experiments suggest that dispersal algorithms ensure a high degree of confidentiality against the slice intruder, no matter the number of storage providers in the system. On the contrary, they show a low level of confidentiality against the provider intruder in networks with few storage providers (e.g. interconnected cloud storage solutions).
Evaluation of Involvement and Multi-Dimensions for Cultural Creativity Products in Remote Districts

Abstract The main purpose of the study is to evaluate the product involvement and multi-dimensions evaluation for innovative and cultural creativity products of the remote districts in Taiwan. A total of 120 subjects divided into two groups (including local group and non-local group) participated in the investigation. In order to achieve the research objective, revised Personal Involvement Inventory designed by Zaichkowsky was applied to evaluate product involvement of the cultural creativity products with Pingtung image. In addition, this study adopted the multi-dimensions evaluation scale to assess four dimensions including the coincidence degree of the cultural image, utility, preference, and intention to purchase. Results showed that “the spice jar with the image of the Onion”, “the spice jar with the image of the Sisal”, and “the spice jar with the image of the Port” were relatively good cultural creativity products on the evaluations of the product involvement and multi-dimensions evaluation by local group and non-local group. Furthermore, it is expected that the research model can be expanded to other remote districts in Taiwan for the research and development of cultural creativity products and can be a model of cultural and creative industries with the combination or cultural creativities and economy to provide the highly valuable reference for industries, officials, and academic research.
Perceptual Quality Assessment for 3D Triangle Mesh Based on Curvature

Triangle meshes are used in representation of 3D geometric models, and they are subject to various visual distortions during geometrical processing and transmission. In this study, we propose a novel objective quality assessment method for 3D meshes based on curvature information; according to characteristics of the human visual system (HVS), two new components including visual masking and saturation effect are designed for the proposed method. Besides, inspired by the fact that the HVS is sensitive to structural information, we compute the structure distortion of 3D meshes. We test the performance of the proposed method on three publicly available databases of 3D mesh quality evaluation. We rotate among these databases for parameter determination to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can predict consistent results in terms of correlation to the subjective scores across the databases.
Cost Efficiency of Web Systems in Municipal Governments of Japan

Targeting local e-governments of Japan, this study examines whether the web system can reduce information system cost or not, namely provide cost efficiency. First, in this study, we analyzed the relationships between the cost efficiency of web systems and the software development approach. By doing so, we demonstrated that a web system and non-customized package is common in the easy structuring of information systems and easy maintenance. By using multi-level models, we clarified that the cost reduction effect of web systems was significant in services where non-customized packaged software is frequently used.
Software Effort Estimation with Different Artificial Neural Network

Failures of software are mainly due to the faulty project management practices, which includes effort estimation. Continuous changing scenarios of software development technology makes effort estimation more challenging. Ability of ANN(Artificial Neural Network) to model a complex set of relationship between the dependent variable (effort) and the independent variables (cost drivers) makes it as a potential tool for estimation. This paper presents a performance analysis of different ANNs in effort estimation. We have simulated four types of ANN created by MATLAB10 NNTool using NASA dataset.
The Quality of Transnational Education: A provider view

Abstract While scholars have been peripatetic since the creation of the very first universities, a phenomenon of more recent years is the mobility of education, where it is the educational provision rather than the scholar that crosses national borders. This is termed ‘transnational’ or cross‐border’ education. Attendant on this new phenomenon is the need to ensure the quality of this education. At present, some countries are more commonly the source of transnational education, whereas others are more commonly recipients. This paper presents the quality assurance procedures for transnational education that are used by one nation (Australia) that is mainly a provider, and concludes with an outline of the extent to which the Australian Universities Quality Agency complies with the UNESCO/OECD Guidelines on Cross‐Border Education.
Psychometric Verification of Perry's Public Service Motivation Instrument

This research note reports a confirmatory factor analysis for three of Perry's (1996) public service motivation (PSM) subdimensions: self-sacrifice, commitment to public interest, and compassion. A mail survey of national award-winning volunteers constitutes the sample. Results indicate strong support for Perry's instrument, most noticeably better results for self-sacrifice than those found in Perry's original exploratory work. Implications and recommendations for PSM instrument development are discussed.
An In-Depth Study of Graph Partitioning Measures for Perceptual Organization

In recent years, one of the effective engines for perceptual organization of low-level image features is based on the partitioning of a graph representation that captures Gestalt inspired local structures, such as similarity, proximity, continuity, parallelism, and perpendicularity, over the low-level image features. Mainly motivated by computational efficiency considerations, this graph partitioning process is usually implemented as a recursive bipartitioning process, where, at each step, the graph is broken into two parts based on a partitioning measure. We focus on three such measures, namely, the minimum, average, and normalized cuts. The minimum cut partition seeks to minimize the total link weights cut. The average cut measure is proportional to the total link weight cut, normalized by the sizes of the partitions. The normalized cut measure is normalized by the product of the total connectivity (valencies) of the nodes in each partition. We provide theoretical and empirical insight into the nature of the three partitioning measures in terms of the underlying image statistics. In particular, we consider for what kinds of image statistics would optimizing a measure, irrespective of the particular algorithm used, result in correct partitioning. Are the quality of the groups significantly different for each cut measure? Are there classes of images for which grouping by partitioning does not work well? Also, can the recursive bipartitioning strategy separate out groups corresponding to K objects from each other? In the analysis, we draw from probability theory and the rich body of work on stochastic ordering of random variables. Our major conclusion is that optimization of none of the three measures is guaranteed to result in the correct partitioning of K objects, in the strict stochastic order sense, for all image statistics.
The Novel Candida albicans Transporter Dur31 Is a Multi-Stage Pathogenicity Factor

Candida albicans is the most frequent cause of oral fungal infections. However, the exact pathogenicity mechanisms that this fungus employs are largely unknown and many of the genes expressed during oral infection are uncharacterized. In this study we sought to functionally characterize 12 previously unknown function genes associated with oral candidiasis. We generated homozygous knockout mutants for all 12 genes and analyzed their interaction with human oral epithelium in vitro. Eleven mutants caused significantly less epithelial damage and, of these, deletion of orf19.6656 (DUR31) elicited the strongest reduction in pathogenicity. Interestingly, DUR31 was not only involved in oral epithelial damage, but in multiple stages of candidiasis, including surviving attack by human neutrophils, endothelial damage and virulence in vivo. In silico analysis indicated that DUR31 encodes a sodium/substrate symporter with 13 transmembrane domains and no human homologue. We provide evidence that Dur31 transports histatin 5. This is one of the very first examples of microbial driven import of this highly cytotoxic antimicrobial peptide. Also, in contrast to wild type C. albicans, dur31Δ/Δ was unable to actively increase local environmental pH, suggesting that Dur31 lies in the extracellular alkalinization hyphal auto-induction pathway; and, indeed, DUR31 was required for morphogenesis. In agreement with this observation, dur31Δ/Δ was unable to assimilate the polyamine spermidine.
Doing Free Jazz and Free Organizations, “A Certain Experience of the Impossible”? Ornette Coleman Encounters Jacques Derrida

Many scholars have attempted to make jazz relevant to an organizational audience. We seek to extend this literature by considering a more radical version of improvisation associated with the jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Inspired by an encounter between Coleman and the philosopher Jacques Derrida, we juxtapose the radical collective responsibility associated with Coleman’s Free jazz improvisation and Derridean deconstruction. We especially emphasize a phrase used by Derrida, “a certain experience of the impossible,” as an expression for a particular experience of doing management. The overall contribution of the article is to explore the possibility of responding to issues within organizations in more participative and improvisational ways, without losing an appreciation of the inherent impossibility (perhaps even absurdity) of the managerial condition.
Social Change and the Timing of Family Transitions in West Germany

This article addresses the timing of family transitions in early adulthood. Theoretical and empirical analyses are used to investigate the appropriateness of the notions of destandardization, differentiation and individualization for characterizing recent changes in West German life courses. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) are used for a comparison of (West German) birth cohorts and the respective timing of moving out of the parental home, first marriage and first parenthood. These transitions have, in fact, undergone a certain temporal destandardization. However, the results suggest that this destandardization is limited to certain dimensions, is clearly socially structured and is in part brought about by changing structural conditions. Furthermore, these changes in timing can be partly explained by differentiation according to education. Individualization, too, is only applicable to a certain degree and in particular to women's life courses.
PCR Master Mixes Harbour Murine DNA Sequences. Caveat Emptor!

Background XMRV is the most recently described retrovirus to be found in Man, firstly in patients with prostate cancer (PC) and secondly in 67% of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and 3.7% of controls. Both disease associations remain contentious. Indeed, a recent publication has concluded that “XMRV is unlikely to be a human pathogen”. Subsequently related but different polytropic MLV (pMLV) sequences were also reported from the blood of 86.5% of patients with CFS. and 6.8% of controls. Consequently we decided to investigate blood donors for evidence of XMRV/pMLV. Methodology/Principal Findings Testing of cDNA prepared from the whole blood of 80 random blood donors, generated gag PCR signals from two samples (7C and 9C). These had previously tested negative for XMRV by two other PCR based techniques. To test whether the PCR mix was the source of these sequences 88 replicates of water were amplified using Invitrogen Platinum Taq (IPT) and Applied Biosystems Taq Gold LD (ABTG). Four gag sequences (2D, 3F, 7H, 12C) were generated with the IPT, a further sequence (12D) by ABTG re-amplification of an IPT first round product. Sequence comparisons revealed remarkable similarities between these sequences, endogeous MLVs and the pMLV sequences reported in patients with CFS. Conclusions/Significance Methodologies for the detection of viruses highly homologous to endogenous murine viruses require special caution as the very reagents used in the detection process can be a source of contamination and at a level where it is not immediately apparent. It is suggested that such contamination is likely to explain the apparent presence of pMLV in CFS.
The mechanism of binding of the KIX domain to the mixed lineage leukemia protein and its allosteric role in the recognition of c‐Myb

The KIX domain is a mediator of the interaction between different transcription factors. This complex function is carried out via two distinct binding sites located on opposite sides of the protein; namely, the ‘c‐Myb site’ and the ‘MLL site’, named after their characteristic ligands—the transactivation domain of c‐Myb and the mixed lineage leukemia protein (MLL). Both these ligands are unstructured in isolation and fold only upon binding, posing the KIX domain as an ideal candidate to explore the binding induced folding reaction of intrinsically unstructured proteins. Here, we complement the recent kinetic description on the interaction between KIX and c‐Myb, by characterizing the binding kinetics between KIX and MLL, at different pH and ionic strength conditions. Furthermore, we analyze quantitatively the mechanism of allosteric communication between the topologically distinct c‐Myb and MLL sites. The implications of our results are discussed in the light of previous work on other intrinsically unstructured systems.
Guanabenz Interferes with ER Stress and Exerts Protective Effects in Cardiac Myocytes

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress has been implicated in a variety of cardiovascular diseases. During ER stress, disruption of the complex of protein phosphatase 1 regulatory subunit 15A and catalytic subunit of protein phosphatase 1 by the small molecule guanabenz (antihypertensive, α2-adrenoceptor agonist) and subsequent inhibition of stress-induced dephosphorylation of eukaryotic translation initiation factor 2α (eIF2α) results in prolonged eIF2α phosphorylation, inhibition of protein synthesis and protection from ER stress. In this study we assessed whether guanabenz protects against ER stress in cardiac myocytes and affects the function of 3 dimensional engineered heart tissue (EHT). We utilized neonatal rat cardiac myocytes for the assessment of cell viability and activation of ER stress-signalling pathways and EHT for functional analysis. (i) Tunicamycin induced ER stress as measured by increased mRNA and protein levels of glucose-regulated protein 78 kDa, P-eIF2α, activating transcription factor 4, C/EBP homologous protein, and cell death. (ii) Guanabenz had no measurable effect alone, but antagonized the effects of tunicamycin on ER stress markers. (iii) Tunicamycin and other known inducers of ER stress (hydrogen peroxide, doxorubicin, thapsigargin) induced cardiac myocyte death, and this was antagonized by guanabenz in a concentration- and time-dependent manner. (iv) ER stressors also induced acute or delayed contractile dysfunction in spontaneously beating EHTs and this was, with the notable exception of relaxation deficits under thapsigargin, not significantly affected by guanabenz. The data confirm that guanabenz interferes with ER stress-signalling and has protective effects on cell survival. Data show for the first time that this concept extends to cardiac myocytes. The modest protection in EHTs points to more complex mechanisms of force regulation in intact functional heart muscle.
Methodological Innovation in Studying Abortion in Developing Countries: A ‘‘Narrative’’ Quantitative Survey in Madhya Pradesh, India

This article describes the development and implementation of a mixed methods data collection method designed to provide high-quality data on the circumstances surrounding abortion in Madhya Pradesh, India. Data collection took place between 2000 and 2002, beginning with a qualitative phase and culminating in a large-scale, representative survey. The survey itself melded a unique narrative interviewing technique with quantitative survey techniques and collected information on 11,341 individual pregnancies from 2,444 women, with a 97% response rate. Abortion rates calculated using these data are found to be roughly five times higher than the National Family Health Survey-2, a comparable sample using more traditional interviewing techniques, suggesting that this approach reduces the underreporting of abortion while providing the contextual information often lacking in survey data.
OntoOntoOntoOntology Based Query Reformulation u logy Based Query Reformulation u logy Based Query Reformulation u logy Based Query Reformulation using Rhetorical Relations sing Rhetorical Relations sing Rhetorical Relations sing Rhetorical Relations

Web searching is becoming more and more complex due to increased size of information on the web. Users have to face a lot of problems in specifying their needs in the form of query. Query Reformulation techniques are required in order to provide users with the results, according to their expectations. The existing reformulation techniques suffer from the problem of not providing users with expected results in all the cases because the mechanisms used behind those techniques are not much fine and accurate. A technique for query reformulation has been presented in this paper which is based on Cross-document Structure Theory (CST) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). A case study has been carried out to validate the proposed technique. The results are satisfactory as set of reformulated queries generated through this technique is semantically more close to the original query which ultimately provides more relevant data to the user.
Michael Jordan Meets C. Wright Mills: Illustrating the Sociological Imagination with Objects from Everyday Life.

L'A. presente une experience pedagogique, menee, aux Etats-Unis, dans le cadre d'un cours de sociologie, afin de developper l'imagination sociologique. Il affirme que l'analyse et l'etude d'objets appartenant a la vie quotidienne peut constituer un exercice fondamental en ce domaine. Il montre comment les etudiants sont invites a decrire ce type d'objet, a puis analyser leur signification a un niveau local, global puis historique. Il s'efforce d'evaluer l'utilite pedagogique de cette experience
Using Self-Contradiction to Learn Confidence Measures in Stereo Vision

Learned confidence measures gain increasing importance for outlier removal and quality improvement in stereo vision. However, acquiring the necessary training data is typically a tedious and time consuming task that involves manual interaction, active sensing devices and/or synthetic scenes. To overcome this problem, we propose a new, flexible, and scalable way for generating training data that only requires a set of stereo images as input. The key idea of our approach is to use different view points for reasoning about contradictions and consistencies between multiple depth maps generated with the same stereo algorithm. This enables us to generate a huge amount of training data in a fully automated manner. Among other experiments, we demonstrate the potential of our approach by boosting the performance of three learned confidence measures on the KITTI2012 dataset by simply training them on a vast amount of automatically generated training data rather than a limited amount of laser ground truth data.
Quality Assurance through a Continuous Curriculum Review (CCR) Strategy: Reflections on a pilot project

Institutional research can be defined as "the activity in which the research effort of an academic institution is directed at the solution of its own problems and to the enhancement of its own performance" (Woodward, 1993, p. 113). This paper describes and reflects on an attempt at the University of Queensland to address the need for course quality appraisal for improvement. The strategy, Continuous Curriculum Review (CCR) is simply an attempt to trial and promote regular comprehensive data collection for developing 'snapshot' views of whole curricula so that decisions about what to change and what to change first can be made in an empirically defensible and timely manner. The strategy and reporting protocols that were developed are described, and the costs and benefits of engaging in this kind of data gathering exercise for quality assurance and quality enhancement purposes are discussed.
Effects of celebrity-organization congruence on audience attitudes, preferences, and credibility ratings for goodwill ambassadors

This study examined the effects of congruence between an organization and its goodwill ambassador in terms of audience attitudes and preferences regarding the organization and the ambassador's own perceived credibility. The analysis showed that audience attitudes and preferences toward the organization and goodwill ambassador's credibility ratings were, generally, more positive with higher levels of celebrity-organization congruence. Comparison of the ambassador's perceived credibility before and after exposure to the campaign showed a significant decline for low congruence, and either no statistical difference or a negative effect for high congruence. The results suggest a need for both the organization and the potential ambassador to take into account the level of congruence, the former when considering the effect with the public from using a celebrity as an ambassador, and the latter when considering his or her personal image management. Theoretical and managerial implications as well as directions for future research are discussed.
Exploration Priority Based Heuristic Approach to UAV path planning

This paper presents a 3D online path planning algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with limited range sensors and computational resources in unknown cluttered environments. Even though quadrotor UAVs are considered to be a promising technology for surveillance purposes in indoor environments and for close observation in outdoor urban areas, it is very difficult to achieve autonomous aerial navigation toward a goal avoiding unpredicted collisions. Furthermore, greater attention and effort should be aimed at improving the computational efficiency and performance of path planning algorithms. The proposed heuristic algorithm offers on-the-fly path findings with a lesser computational complexity. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm in a real world scenario implemented using the V-REP simulator.