Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Future readers: narrating the human in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the growing awareness of anthropogenic climate change and of the possibility of human extinction has begun to alter the very function of narrative; understood as a mode of knowledge, and as a technology through which cultural knowledge is archived in the present, narrative no longer only serves as a way of (cognitively) organising and emplotting human experience, but also as a way of (affectively) apprehending the end of possible human life. The essay develops this argument through a discussion of one of the most popular tropes in the Anthropocene imagination: that of a future reader who, in an imagined future, reads the remains of contemporary existence. Drawing on an archive of contemporary and of popular science writing, the essay argues that this future reader takes two different disciplinary forms: as a historian who chronicles historical errors that she, unlike us, is able to appreciate, or as an archaeologist who will be left to read mankind’s geological footprint after its extinction. While the former, historical mode conforms to a traditional use of narrative, the second, geological one points up the anxieties, desires, and uncertainties besetting the anticipation of human extinction - here routed through the imagining of a radically nonhermeneutic and nonhuman form of registration.
Copy Number Variation in Subjects with Major Depressive Disorder Who Attempted Suicide

Background Suicide is one of the top ten leading causes of death in North America and represents a major public health burden, partcularly for people with Major Depressive disorder (MD). Many studies have suggested that suicidal behavior runs in families, however, identification of genomic loci that drive this efffect remain to be identified. Methodology/Principal Findings Using subjects collected as part of STAR*D, we genotyped 189 subjects with MD with history of a suicide attempt and 1073 subjects with Major Depressive disorder that had never attempted suicide. Copy Number Variants (CNVs) were called in Birdsuite and analyzed in PLINK. We found a set of CNVs present in the suicide attempter group that were not present in in the non-attempter group including in SNTG2 and MACROD2 – two brain expressed genes previously linked to psychopathology; however, these results failed to reach genome-wide signifigance. Conclusions These data suggest potential CNVs to be investigated further in relation to suicide attempts in MD using large sample sizes.
An implementation of a new public key system based on RSA which leads hackers solve multiple hard problems to break the cipher

A public key system is a form of crypto system in which the encryption and decryption are performed using different keys, one is public and other one is private. The mostly used public key systems like RSA, knapsack system, Elliptical curve etc are based on a single hard problem like factoring or discrete logarithm. Even if these algorithms are very secure now, in future the situation can be changed and someone can solve the single hard problem easily. In this work, a new paired cipher text public key System based on RSA is designed, which incorporates two hard mathematical problems (Both Discrete logarithms and Factoring) to make the algorithm too secure.
Implementation of TCP Recognition of Broken Order ( TCP-BO ) Algorithm

The transmission control protocol (TCP) is one of the most popular and widely used end-to-end protocols for the Internet today. Unlike routing, where packets are relayed hop-by-hop toward their destination, TCP actually provides reliable end to-end transmission of transport-level segments from source to receiver. As TCP was designed for wired networks it considers that all packet loss in the network is due to congestion. Wireless medium is more exposed to transmission errors and sudden topological changes. So in this paper, we have analyzed the performance of TORA ,which was one of important hierarchal routing protocol under TCPSACK. In this paper, we also proposed TCP Recognition of Broken Order and Answer with Time Stamp (TCP-BO) algorithm, the negativity of TCP has been conquering, and it is confirmed that broken order packet is delivered due to multi-path routing protocol. The simulation shows that, TCPBO algorithm has higher performance than TCP-SACK. The TCP with selective acknowledgement scheme (TCP SACK) improves TCP performance by allowing the TCP sender to retransmit packets based on selective ACKs provided by the receiver. Keywords— MANET, TCP, SACK.
The pixel alignment based algorithm for continuous orientation field estimation

This paper presents a new estimation method of fing erprint orientation field. An accurate estimation o f fingerprint orientation fields is an essential step in automatic fingerprint recognition systems (AFIS ). Most popular, gradient–based method is very sensitive to noise (i mage quality). Proposed algorithm is a modification of, more resistant to noise, mask-based method, which provid es orientation limited to discrete values. This mod ification is based on aggregation of pixel values differentiation and was used to more precise estimation of magnitude of orientation vectors. This approach allows to obtain a continuou s values of orientation field still maintaining rob ust to noise.
Automatically embedding newsworthy links to articles

It is of great interest to news providers such as Yahoo! News to attain higher visitor rates by promoting greater engagement with their content. One aspect of engagement deals with keeping users on the site longer by allowing them to navigate through content with enhanced, click-through experiences. News portals have invested in ways to provide embedded links within news stories. So far these links have been manually curated by professional editors, and due to the manual effort involved, the use of such links has been limited. In this paper we propose an automated approach to detecting and linking newsworthy events to associated articles. Our analysis, conducted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, reveals that our system's performance is comparable to that of professional editors, and that users find the automatically generated highlights interesting and the associated articles worthy of reading.
Improved Hop-by-Hop Congestion Control Algorithm

Network congestion plays an important role in degrading the performance of the communication network. Thus it is important to detect and control congestion in order to improve the performance of the network. There are various sources for congestion like packet collision, buffer overflow, concurrent transmission etc. This paper focuses on hop by hop congestion control mechanism. The proposed protocol is very efficient in detecting and controlling congestion. Every time a new packet arrives at the router, it keeps track of the number of packets in the queue. Based on the measured value the router effectively adapts its transmission data rate to control congestion. Keywords— Hop-by-hop congestion control mechanism, congestion detection, congestion control
African Union promotion of human security in Africa

This paper explores the contribution of the African Union (AU) to human security promotion in Africa. It contends that human security concerns informed the formation of the AU. Through the efforts of the AU Commission, the African ruling elite and policy-makers have become aware of human security doctrines. Human security ideas have been integrated into AU binding agreements, declarations, decisions and policies. The commission is now in the difficult, yet most important, phase of trying to persuade significant numbers of the African ruling elite and civil society to accept human security as a guiding principle and the desirable norm. Through the African Citizens' Directorate (CIDO), the commission is using indigenous African civil society groups to institutionalise human security doctrines in Africa. The commission faces serious challenges in its efforts to make human security the only security norm. While member states of the AU that have never been comfortable with the introduction of human security doctrines into the continental integration project are tacitly undermining the CIDO's ability to work with civil society groups to institutionalise the doctrines in Africa, the leaders who enthusiastically supported the integration of human security doctrines into the documents and work of the AU have seemed in recent times to be less resolute in their support of AU Commission's human security work.
Linear Transforms : From Math to Efficient Hardware Extended

Introduction. Linear transforms (such as the discrete Fourier transform) are widely used building blocks in signal processing applications. The domain of linear transforms and their algorithms is well understood mathematically. In this work, we utilize this math-level knowledge to construct a formula driven domain specific high-level synthesis tool. This tool is able to generate efficient register transfer level designs from a mathematical description of the problem. The tool’s flexibility allows its generated designs to span a wide cost/performance tradeoff space.
A novel approach for task scheduling in cloud

Cloud computing is a popular computing paradigm which enables delivery of on-demand services over the internet. A cloud environment consists of multiple customers requesting for the available resources. Cloud vendors who offer Infrastructure as a Service should enable efficient management of the available resources. Proper scheduling in cloud enables the selection of best suitable resources for task execution. In the present scenario, allocating the resources efficiently is a challenging job. Service providers need to ensure that their resources are utilized properly. A new scheduling algorithm is proposed to address the challenge of task scheduling in cloud. The user tasks are prioritized. Based on the priority, the tasks are assigned to the Virtual Machines. The task with highest priority is assigned to a Virtual Machine with highest processing power. The proposed model is simulated using the CloudSim toolkit. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model results in lower execution time as the resources are allocated more efficiently.
Attack Patterns for Black-Box Security Testing of Multi-Party Web Applications

The advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has led to the development of multi-party web applications (MPWAs). MPWAs rely on core trusted third-party systems (e.g., payment servers, identity providers) and protocols such as Cashier-as-aService (CaaS), Single Sign-On (SSO) to deliver business services to users. Motivated by the large number of attacks discovered against MPWAs and by the lack of a single general-purpose application-agnostic technique to support their discovery, we propose an automatic technique based on attack patterns for black-box, security testing of MPWAs. Our approach stems from the observation that attacks against popular MPWAs share a number of similarities, even if the underlying protocols and services are different. In this paper, we target six different replay attacks, a login CSRF attack and a persistent XSS attack. Firstly, we propose a methodology in which security experts can create attack patterns from known attacks. Secondly, we present a security testing framework that leverages attack patterns to automatically generate test cases for testing the security of MPWAs. We implemented our ideas on top of OWASP ZAP (a popular, open-source penetration testing tool), created seven attack patterns that correspond to thirteen prominent attacks from the literature and discovered twenty one previously unknown vulnerabilities in prominent MPWAs (e.g., twitter.com, developer.linkedin.com, pinterest.com), including MPWAs that do not belong to SSO and CaaS families.
Optimistic Aborts for Geo-distributed Transactions

Network latency can have a significant impact on the performance of transactional storage systems, particularly in wide area or geo-distributed deployments. To reduce latency, systems typically rely on a cache to service read-requests closer to the client. However, caches are not effective for write-heavy workloads, which have to be processed by the storage system in order to maintain serializability. This paper presents a new technique, called optimistic abort, which reduces network latency for high-contention, write-heavy workloads by identifying transactions that will abort as early as possible, and aborting them before they reach the store. We have implemented optimistic abort in a system called Gotthard, which leverages recent advances in network data plane programmability to execute transaction processing logic directly in network devices. Gotthard examines network traffic to observe and log transaction requests. If Gotthard suspects that a transaction is likely to be aborted at the store, it aborts the transaction early by re-writing the packet header, and routing the packets back to the client. Gotthard significantly reduces the overall latency and improves the throughput for high-contention workloads.
Bio-inspired Algorithms for FPGA Implementation of RFID Base-Band Transmission Model &amp; IP Core

In order to obtain accurate and reliable data communication course in the RFID system, this work presents an implementation of an RFID base-band communication model with bio-inspired algorithms on field programmable gate array (FPGA). The proposed model utilizes FPGA technology to design a communication IP core, which integrates base-band encoding/decoding and data transmitting modules that have the advantages of internal task scheduling and high encoding/decoding speed. The bio-inspired search technique is independent of the RFID base-band communication structure and is capable of converging on the global solution for multimodal optimization problems, which makes it especially useful for optimizing the communication model to minimize bit error rate. We present a comparative study for three bio-inspired algorithms, namely Genetic Algorithm (GA), Evolution Strategy (ES), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), on the Quartusand Simulink simulating tools. The simulation results indicate that the proposed FPGA-based communication model, which offers a highly-integrated base band communication IP core, is completely feasible in terms of optimization accuracy and communication robustness.
Age Differences in the Capacity of Visual Short-term Memory: Effects of Stimulus Type and Information Load

1.40 times) than meaningful items (1.07 times). In Experiment 1, we found an increased information load for abstract items, and greater age differences in information load for abstract items. In Experiment 2, we wanted to see if the pattern of age differences found in visual search would be replicated in a STM task. In other words, would greater age differences in visual search for abstract items be reflected in greater age differences in STM for abstract items? Experiment 2 examined STM accuracy for the same abstract and meaningful items as Experiment 1, and used the same participants. CHAPTER VIII Experiment 2 Experiment 2 assessed the effects of age and item type on STM performance in a Delayed Match to Sample (DMTS) task. Our goals included: 1) comparing age differences in STM accuracy for items from abstract and meaningful classes, 2) comparing intra-class differences in accuracy for items with low, medium, and high load, and 3) comparing subsets of abstract and meaningful items matched for load on accuracy. Though the intention was to analyze matched subsets for both age groups, these subsets of items were matched and analyzed in younger adults only because there were no overlapping subsets of abstract and meaningful items in older adults. The version of the Delayed Match to Sample (DMTS) task used in this experiment is a simple storage task that involves the simultaneous presentation of five stimuli followed by an unfilled delay and a single-item recognition memory test. The dependent variable, proportion correct (accuracy), was used as the measure of STM capacity. In Experiment 2, we first expected to find higher accuracy for meaningful than abstract items. Second, we predicted that younger adults would have higher overall accuracy than older adults. Third, we predicted greater age differences for abstract items. By analyzing a subset of meaningful and abstract items that were matched on information load in younger adults, we also expected to disentangle the contribution of information load and item type tomemory accuracy. We reasoned that if accuracy for abstract items in the matched subset
Campaigning in the fourth age of political communication. A multi-method study on the use of Facebook by German and Austrian parties in the 2013 national election campaigns

ABSTRACT Starting from the contribution to the discussion on a fourth age of political communication, here we argue that, as a consequence of how the Web 2.0 has changed political campaigns, the theoretical time-bound three-phase models of political campaigning must be reconsidered. We propose four ideal campaign types based on their ideal-typical target audience: partisan-, mass-, target group- and individual-centered campaigns. In reality, each campaign combines elements of all types. To examine this mixture empirically, we apply a most similar systems design and investigate five German and six Austrian parties’ use of Facebook in the 2013 national election campaigns. On the basis of face-to-face interviews with the campaign managers and a quantitative content analysis of the respective parties’ Facebook pages, we analyze how parties used Facebook as a campaigning tool to inform, interact with, and mobilize voters, as well as which target audiences they addressed. We find that, although the campaign managers declare Facebook their most important Web 2.0 campaigning tool, the German and Austrian parties did not make use of Facebook’s interactive and mobilizing potential, rather relying on mass-centered information, possibly due to the framework conditions in both countries. Based on our findings, we conclude that the role of context for election campaigning should be discussed more carefully.
An Experimental Comparison of Kernel Clustering Methods

In this paper, we compare the performances of some among the most popular kernel clustering methods on several data sets. The methods are all based on central clustering and incorporate in various ways the concepts of fuzzy clustering and kernel machines. The data sets are a sample of several application domains and sizes. A thorough discussion about the techniques for validating results is also presented. Results indicate that clustering in kernel space generally outperforms standard clustering, although no method can be proven to be consistently better than the others.
Ciguatera poisoning: a global issue with common management problems

Ciguatera poisoning, a toxinological syndrome comprising an enigmatic mixture of gastrointestinal, neurocutaneous and constitutional symptoms, is a common food-borne illness related to contaminated fish consumption. As many as 50 000 cases worldwide are reported annually, and the condition is endemic in tropical and subtropical regions of the Pacific Basin, Indian Ocean and Caribbean. Isolated outbreaks occur sporadically but with increasing frequency in temperate areas such as Europe and North America. Increase in travel between temperate countries and endemic areas and importation of susceptible fish has led to its encroachment into regions of the world where ciguatera has previously been rarely encountered. In the developed world, ciguatera poses a public health threat due to delayed or missed diagnosis. Ciguatera is frequently encountered in Australia. Sporadic cases are often misdiagnosed or not medically attended to, leading to persistent or recurrent debilitating symptoms lasting months to years. Without treatment, distinctive neurologic symptoms persist, occasionally being mistaken for multiple sclerosis. Constitutional symptoms may be misdiagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. A common source outbreak is easier to recognize and therefore notify to public health organizations. We present a case series of four adult tourists who developed ciguatera poisoning after consuming contaminated fish in Vanuatu. All responded well to intravenous mannitol. This is in contrast to a fifth patient who developed symptoms suggestive of ciguatoxicity in the same week as the index cases but actually had staphylococcal endocarditis with bacteraemia. In addition to a lack of response to mannitol, clinical and laboratory indices of sepsis were present in this patient. Apart from ciguatera, acute gastroenteritis followed by neurological symptoms may be due to paralytic or neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, scombroid and pufferfish toxicity, botulism, enterovirus 71, toxidromes and bacteraemia. Clinical aspects of ciguatera toxicity, its pathophysiology, diagnostic difficulties and epidemiology are discussed.
Commercial Scenarios for the Web: Opportunities and Challenges

The potential of the World Wide Web on the Internet as a commercial medium and market has been widely documented in a variety of media. However, a critical examination of its commercial development has received little attention. Therefore, in this paper we propose a structural framework for examining the explosion in commercial activity on the Web. First, we explore the role of the Web as a distribution channel and a medium for marketing communications. Second, we examine the factors that have led to the development of the Web as a commercial medium, evaluating the benefits it provides to both consumers and firms and its attractive size and demographic characteristics. Third, we discuss the barriers to commercial growth of the Web from both the supply and demand side perspectives. This analysis leads to a new classification of commercialization efforts that categorizes commercial Web sites into six distinct types including 1) Online Storefront, 2) Internet Presence, 3) Content, 4) Mall, 5) Incentive Site, and, 6) Search Agent. The first three comprise the “Integrated Destination Site,” and the latter three represent forms of “Web Traffic Control. ” Our framework, argued in the context of integrated marketing, facilitates greater understanding of the Web as a commercial medium, and allows examination of commercial Web sites in terms of the opportunities and challenges firms face in the rush towards commercialization.
Taxonomy Based Data Extraction from Multi-item Web Pages

In this paper, we present a taxonomy-driven approach to the extraction of data records from web pages containing multiple similar items. In our approach, we first automatically extract a taxonomy from the web for the target domain, then extract data records from web pages in the target domain, and finally use the automatically-extracted taxonomy to automatically annotate feature values in the text of each data record. A key advantage of our approach is that it permits data extraction without human labeling or training. Our evaluation results show that our approach performs well for this task.
Pulse Matched Filter Implementation for Reconfigurable Ultra-Wideband Receiver

Ultra wideband communication is one of the solutions for future wireless personal area networks because of its potential to achieve low data communication rate at 10-30 m distance with possible digital implementation. This paper presents the application specific integrated circuit implementation of a pulse matched filter for mostly digital receiver architecture. This architecture uses significant parallelism in order to speed up received pulse acquisition and synchronisation, resulting in increased power consumption. The paper presents the factors and analysis of parallelism dependency for different channel conditions and time delays. It also discusses one possible algorithm for intelligent adaptation of the parallelism in order to reduce power consumption and its design constraints.