Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discrete Logarithms and Elliptic Curves in Cryptography

Since ancient times, there has been a tug-of-war taking place between code makers and code breakers. Only within the last fifty years have the code makers emerged victorious (for now that is) with the advent of public key cryptography. This paper surveys the mathematical foundations, shortcomings, and novel variants of the “first” public key cryptosystem envisioned by Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle in 1976. The system they developed, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, relied on the difficulty of taking discrete logarithms in the finite fields Zp, where p is prime. While relatively secure, methods known as the index calculus exist to crack Diffie-Hellman key exchange in less than exponential running time. This has led to the use of elliptic curves in analogous cryptosystems. The basic theory underlying these elliptic curve cryptosystems is presented as well as a comparison of these systems with standard RSA encryption.
Genetic Optimized Fuzzy Extreme Learning Machine Ensembles for Affect Classification

This paper presents a method for generating an optimized ensemble of fuzzy extreme learning machines (FELM) using a combination of genetic algorithms with a Bayesian Information Criterion (GA-BIC) fitness function. The operation of the FELM is equivalent to that of a fuzzy inference system, and is used for learning and classifying a given data set. The relative simplicity of the FELM structure enables a large number of FELMs to be generated in a short time. GA-BIC is used to select the minimum number of FELMs while maximizing the effectiveness of the classifier ensemble.
Open‐Label Support for Duloxetine for the Treatment of Panic Disorder

Panic disorder with or without agoraphobia is a common, often chronic and refractory anxiety disorder. Although a number of pharmacotherapies are now indicated for panic disorder, many patients do not respond to available interventions. We hypothesized that duloxetine, a serotonin‐norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) that has greater initial noradrenergic effects than venlafaxine, would have broad efficacy for individuals with panic disorder. Fifteen individuals with panic disorder with or without agoraphobia received 8 weeks of open label duloxetine flexibly dosed from 60 to 120 mg per day. Duloxetine treatment resulted in significant anxiolysis as measured by the primary outcome measure, the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS) (paired t(df) = 4.02(14), P= 0.0013), as well as measures of generalized anxiety, depression and quality of life (all P < 0.05). Although definitive conclusions are limited due to its small open‐label nature, this first prospective study provides preliminary support for the efficacy of duloxetine for panic disorder and suggests larger randomized controlled study is warranted.
A Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Cascade Module, MKK3-MPK6 and MYC2, Is Involved in Blue Light-Mediated Seedling Development in Arabidopsis[C][W]

The connection between the MAP kinase cascade and light signaling is unknown. This work shows that the MKK3-MPK6 is activated by blue light in a MYC2-dependent manner during Arabidopsis seedling development. MPK6 physically interacts and phosphorylates MYC2, which in turn binds to the promoter of MPK6 and regulates its expression in a feedback mechanism under blue light signaling. Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways are involved in several signal transduction processes in eukaryotes. Light signal transduction pathways have been extensively studied in plants; however, the connection between MAPK and light signaling pathways is currently unknown. Here, we show that MKK3-MPK6 is activated by blue light in a MYC2-dependent manner. MPK6 physically interacts with and phosphorylates a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor, MYC2, and is phosphorylated by a MAPK kinase, MKK3. Furthermore, MYC2 binds to the MPK6 promoter and regulates its expression in a feedback regulatory mechanism in blue light signaling. We present mutational and physiological studies that illustrate the function of the MKK3-MPK6-MYC2 module in Arabidopsis thaliana seedling development and provide a revised mechanistic view of photomorphogenesis.
Digital Makeup Face Generation

Make up applications offer photoshop tools to get users inputs in generating a make up face. While this has been a well established area of development, automatic transfer of makeup from a reference to a target image presents more challenges. This project applies the make up from a reference image to a target on a pixel by pixel basis. The reference and target were aligned by warping using 77 detected face landmarks. The images were decomposed into large scale layer, detail layer and color layer through which makeup highlights and color information were transferred by Poisson editing, weighted means and alpha blending. The test results showed that the techniques work well with reference images of a different age, a different skin color and even a hand-sketched reference image.
Mutational analysis of the herpes simplex virus type 1 ICP0 C3HC4 zinc ring finger reveals a requirement for ICP0 in the expression of the essential alpha27 gene

The herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) immediate-early (IE) protein ICP0 has been implicated in the regulation of viral gene expression and the reactivation of latent HSV-1. Evidence demonstrates that ICP0 is an activator of viral gene expression yet does not distinguish between a direct or indirect role in this process. To further our understanding of the function of ICP0 in the context of the virus life cycle, site-directed mutagenesis of the consensus C3HC4 zinc finger domain was performed, and the effects of these mutations on the growth and replication of HSV-1 were assessed. We demonstrate that alteration of any of the consensus C3HC4 cysteine or histidine residues within this domain abolishes ICP0-mediated transactivation, alters the intranuclear localization of ICP0, and significantly increases its stability. These mutations result in severe defects in the growth and DNA replication of recombinant herpesviruses and in their ability to initiate lytic infections at low multiplicities of infection. These viruses, at low multiplicities of infection, synthesize wild-type levels of the IE proteins ICP0 and ICP4 at early times postinfection yet exhibit significant decreases in the synthesis of the essential IE protein ICP27. These findings reveal a role for ICP0 in the expression of ICP27 and suggest that the multiplicity-dependent growth of alpha0 mutant viruses results partially from reduced levels of ICP27.
Initiation of cofilin activity in response to EGF is uncoupled from cofilin phosphorylation and dephosphorylation in carcinoma cells

It has been demonstrated that the actin-severing activity of cofilin can be downregulated by LIM kinase (LIMK)-dependent phosphorylation at residue Ser3. Chemotactic stimulaton in various cell types induces cofilin dephosphorylation, suggesting that cofilin activation in these cells occurs by a dephosphorylation mechanism. However, resting metastatic carcinoma cells have the majority of their cofilin in a dephosphorylated but largely inactive state. Stimulation with epidermal growth factor (EGF) induces an increase in cofilin activity after 60 seconds together with an increase in phosphorylated cofilin (p-cofilin), indicating that cofilin dephosphorylation is not coupled to cofilin activation in these cells. Suppression of LIMK function by inhibiting Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) or LIMK siRNA inhibited the EGF-induced cofilin phosphorylation but had no effect on cofilin activity or cofilin-dependent lamellipod protrusion induced by EGF. Correlation analysis revealed that cofilin, p-cofilin and LIMK are not colocalized, and changes in the location of these proteins upon stimulation with EGF indicate that they are not functionally coupled. Phospholipase C, which has been implicated in cofilin activation following stimulation with EGF, does not regulate p-cofilin levels following stimulation with EGF. Therefore, our results do not support a model for the initial activation of cofilin by dephosphorylation in response to chemoattractant stimulation in metastatic carcinoma cells.
A Study of the Characteristics of Outstanding Missing Persons: Implications for the Development of Police Risk Assessment

The police response to missing persons has attracted growing levels of scrutiny, resulting in an increasing demand to ensure police decisions taken about the likely “outcome” of a disappearance are based on empirical evidence as well as clinical expertise. While most missing persons return soon after their disappearance, a small proportion will remain missing for prolonged periods of time and require ongoing police review and risk assessment. This article presents the findings from an analysis of over 1,000 people reported missing to the police who, at the time of data collection, had remained missing for more than one year. The findings illustrate that long-term outstanding missing persons are more likely to be male, adults and over-represented by people from minority ethnic backgrounds. While it is not possible to know what has actually happened to the individuals concerned, the study indicates that the overall sample is likely to comprise a number of discrete subgroups of individuals experiencing different outcomes (e.g., suicide, homicide, assuming a new identity).
Preservice teachers’ conceptions about computers: an ongoing search for transformative appropriations of modern technologies

Due to the variety of text forms that are being created as a result of improving information technologies, understandings of literacy must be broadened to include a variety of meaning‐making modes in order to include different social, cultural, and material contexts. The following case study examined the conceptions of technology held by two English preservice teachers enrolled in a required educational technology course designed to encourage the appropriation and integration of transformative uses of technology. Qualitative methodology was used in order to construct a detailed, intrinsic study. Cross‐case analyses established that the preservice teachers saw technology as a primarily utilitarian tool rather than a transformational one. These conceptions were greatly influenced by their personal experiences with technology and were not altered greatly by the content and/or theories presented in the educational technology course. For the greater teacher and teaching research community, significant aspects of this study include the attempt to relay preservice teachers’ conceptions of technology from a qualitative, emic perspective, to add to the body of pedagogical narratives recording learners’ experiences with evolving information technologies, and to broaden research fields that examine knowledge bases of preservice teacher conceptions as well as those that investigate technological conceptions, classifications, and categorizations.
Secure, Fast, and Energy-Efficient Outsourced Authentication for Smartphones

Common smartphone authentication mechanisms (e.g., PINs, graphical passwords, and fingerprint scans) are not designed to offer security post-login. Multi-modal continuous authentication addresses this issue by frequently and unobtrusively authenticating the user via behavioral biometric signals, such as touchscreen interaction and hand movements. Because smartphones can easily fall into the hands of the adversary, it is critical that the behavioral biometric information collected and processed on these devices is secured. This can be done by offloading encrypted template information to a remote server, and then performing authentication via privacy-preserving protocols. In this paper, we demonstrate that the energy overhead of current privacy-preserving protocols for continuous authentication is unsustainable on smartphones. To reduce energy consumption, we design a technique that leverages characteristics unique to the authentication setting in order to securely outsource computation to an untrusted Cloud. Our approach is secure against a colluding smartphone and Cloud, thus making it well suited for authentication. We performed extensive experimental evaluation. With our technique, the energy requirement for running an authentication instance that computes Manhattan distance is 0.2 mWh, which corresponds to a negligible fraction of the smartphone's battery capacity. In addition, for Manhattan distance, our protocol runs in 0.72 and 2 s for 8 and 28 biometric features, respectively. We were also able to compute Hamming distance in 3.29 s, compared with 95.57 s achieved with the previous fastest outsourced computation protocol (Whitewash). These results demonstrate that ours is presently the only technique suitable for low-latency continuous authentication (e.g., with authentication scan windows of 60 s or shorter).
Estimating Doppler Shift Using Bat-Inspired Cochlear Filter Bank Models: A Comparison of Methods for Echoes from Single and Multiple Reflectors

This work presents biologically inspired engineering on the use of narrowband sonar in mobile robotics. It replicates, using robotics as a modeling medium, elements of how CF-FM bats process the constant frequency part of their emitted call for estimating Doppler shift in the echoes. The experimental platform for the work is RoBat, a 6-DOF biomimetic sonar head mounted on a 3-DOF mobile platform. Two models of the signal processing performed by the bat's cochlea were implemented, based on sets of bandpass filters followed by full-wave rectification and lowpass filtering. One filter bank uses Butterworth filters whose center frequencies vary linearly across the set. The alternative filter bank uses gammatone filters, with center frequencies varying nonlinearly across the set. Two methods of estimating Doppler shift from the return echoes after cochlear signal processing were implemented. The first was a simple energy-weighted average of filter center frequencies. The second was a novel neural-network-based technique. Each method was tested with each of the cochlear models and evaluated in the context of several dynamic tasks in which RoBat was moved at different velocities toward stationary echo sources such as walls and posts. Overall, the performance of the linear filter bank was more consistent than the gammatone. The same applies to the artificial neural network, with consistently better noise performance than the weighted average. The effect of multiple reflectors contained in a single echo was also analyzed in terms of error in Doppler-shift estimation assuming a single wider reflector.
Pleiotropic locus for emotion recognition and amygdala volume identified using univariate and bivariate linkage.

OBJECTIVE The role of the amygdala in emotion recognition is well established, and amygdala volume and emotion recognition performance have each been shown separately to be highly heritable traits, but the potential role of common genetic influences on both traits has not been explored. The authors investigated the pleiotropic influences of amygdala volume and emotion recognition performance. METHOD In a sample of randomly selected extended pedigrees (N=858), the authors used a combination of univariate and bivariate linkage to investigate pleiotropy between amygdala volume and emotion recognition performance and followed up with association analysis. RESULTS The authors found a pleiotropic region for amygdala volume and emotion recognition performance on chromosome 4q26 (LOD score=4.40). Association analysis conducted in the region underlying the bivariate linkage peak revealed a variant meeting the corrected significance level (Bonferroni-corrected p=5.01×10(-5)) within an intron of PDE5A (rs2622497, p=4.4×10(-5)) as being jointly influential on both traits. PDE5A has been implicated previously in recognition-memory deficits and is expressed in subcortical structures that are thought to underlie memory ability, including the amygdala. CONCLUSIONS This study extends our understanding of the shared etiology between the amygdala and emotion recognition by showing that the overlap between amygdala volume and emotion recognition performance is due at least in part to common genetic influences. Moreover, this study identifies a pleiotropic locus for the two traits and an associated variant, which localizes the genetic signal even more precisely. These results, when taken in the context of previous research, highlight the potential utility of PDE5 inhibitors for ameliorating emotion recognition deficits in individuals suffering from mental or neurodegenerative illness.
Customizing Reconfigurable On-Chip Crossbar Scheduler

We present a design of a customized crossbar scheduler for on-chip networks. The proposed scheduler arbitrates on-demand interconnects, where physical topologies are identical to logical topologies for given applications. Considering conventional fully parallel and sequential schedulers as reference designs, a comparative performance analysis is conducted. The hardware scheduler module is implemented with parameterized arbiter arrays. Experiments with practical applications show that the crossbar network with our custom scheduler realizes on-demand traffic patterns, occupies on average 52% less area, and maintains higher performance, compared to the crossbar network with a fully parallel scheduler. Additionally, our custom scheduler performs significantly better than the sequential scheduler with moderate area overheads for small-sized tokens communicated over large networks.
6: Learning and Earning in the Postschool Years

This chapter is concerned with basic research in positive economics: identification and explanation of the economic aspects of learning after entry into employment and of the remuneration paid for acquired skills. Broad societal concerns such as optimality or waste in the allocation of resources, and the distribution of earnings and of access to learning options —problems to which many engaged in basic research direct their attention —are included. However, work directed primarily to narrower policy ques­ tions or to narrowly delimited project assessments such as the benefit-cost assessments of programs under the Manpower Development and Training Act is excluded. (For a systematic summarization of the extensive work on cost-benefit analysis and manpower programs, including an up-to-date bib­ liography, see Barsby, 1972.) Also excluded are studies focusing on partic­ ular occupations or career lines. Even with such exclusions, the task of this chapter is enormous. Economic analyses of postschool learning and earning have multiplied in recent years and even in recent months.
Lung Bacterial Clearance in Murine Pneumococcal Pneumonia

We studied the bactericidal capacity of the rat lung during the development of pneumococcal pneumonia. Pneumonia was produced in a lower lobe by the intrabronchial instillation of 104Streptococcus pneumoniae cells in buffer. Lung bacterial counts progressively increased, reaching 107 per lung within 48 h, and the increase was associated with localized atelectasis and consolidation. Bacterial multiplication was inhibited with tetracycline at various intervals after infection, and the subsequent clearance of pneumococci was determined. Viable pneumococci were rapidly killed by lung defenses if bacterial multiplication was inhibited within 12 h of the onset of infection. No change occurred in the bacterial populationif tetracycline was delayed until 24 h after infection, indicating that pneumococcal killing by lung defenses had ceased. This effect could be reproduced with the addition of pneumococcal capsular polysaccharide to the inoculum, which produced a dose-related inhibition of pneumococcal clearance. The clearance of S. epidermidis was not impaired in the presence of pneumococcal pneumonia or by administration of exogenous capsular polysaccharide. These data indicate that pneumococcal pneumonia causes a marked impairment in lung antipneumococcal defenses within 24 h of the onset of infection. This acquired defect in antibacterial defenses may be due to the accumulation of pneumococcal capsular material in the lungs of infected animals.
The Cysteine Protease α-Clostripain is Not Essential for the Pathogenesis of Clostridium perfringens-Mediated Myonecrosis

Clostridium perfringens is the causative agent of clostridial myonecrosis or gas gangrene and produces many different extracellular toxins and enzymes, including the cysteine protease α-clostripain. Mutation of the α-clostripain structural gene, ccp, alters the turnover of secreted extracellular proteins in C. perfringens, but the role of α-clostripain in disease pathogenesis is not known. We insertionally inactivated the ccp gene C. perfringens strain 13 using TargeTron technology, constructing a strain that was no longer proteolytic on skim milk agar. Quantitative protease assays confirmed the absence of extracellular protease activity, which was restored by complementation with the wild-type ccp gene. The role of α-clostripain in virulence was assessed by analysing the isogenic wild-type, mutant and complemented strains in a mouse myonecrosis model. The results showed that although α-clostripain was the major extracellular protease, mutation of the ccp gene did not alter either the progression or the development of disease. These results do not rule out the possibility that this extracellular enzyme may still have a role in the early stages of the disease process.
Tutorial on Stochastic Optimization in Energy—Part II: An Energy Storage Illustration

In Part I of this tutorial, we provided a canonical modeling framework for sequential, stochastic optimization (control) problems. A major feature of this framework is a clear separation of the process of modeling a problem, versus the design of policies to solve the problem. In Part II, we provide additional discussion behind some of the more subtle concepts such as the construction of a state variable. We illustrate the modeling process using an energy storage problem. We then create five variations of this problem designed to bring out the features of the different policies. The first four of these problems demonstrate that each of the four classes of policies is best for particular problem characteristics. The fifth policy is a hybrid that illustrates the ability to combine the strengths of multiple policy classes.
‘Community’ As a Guiding Theme for the Public Speaking Course

Course: Public Speaking Objectives: To meet course objectives related to informative, persuasive, and group presentations. To introduce students to aspects of communities, including university, city, regional, and/or vocational communities, through the informative speech assignment. To introduce students to controversial issues from one of their communities through the persuasive speech assignment. To provide students with the opportunity to learn about and serve the local community, while gaining meaningful group experiences through the group presentation assignment. To provide students with opportunities to learn research skills.
Costs, effects and cost‐effectiveness of breast cancer control in Ghana

Objective Breast cancer control in Ghana is characterised by low awareness, late‐stage treatment and poor survival. In settings with severely constrained health resources, there is a need to spend money wisely. To achieve this and to guide policy makers in their selection of interventions, this study systematically compares costs and effects of breast cancer control interventions in Ghana.