Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment

Crime generates external costs for individuals and social costs for nations. This chapter reviews the dominant theoretical paradigms that underlie national estimates of the cost of crime and reviews the empirical methodologies that have been employed in the extant literature. The chapter closes with a brief review of empirical estimates of the costs of crime to crime victims. In the United States, the cost of crime, narrowly construed, constitutes approximately 2 percent of gross domestic product, approximately double the amount of revenue generated by the education sector and half the amount of revenue produced by the U.S. entertainment industry. Some estimates of the cost of crime are as large as 6 percent of GDP. Prepared for The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment
Reducing and constraining the intrinsic galaxy alignment contamination to weak lensing measurements

We present a method for removal of the contaminating effects of intrinsic galaxy alignments, in measurements of cosmic shear from multicolour weak lensing surveys. The method down-weights pairs which are likely to be close in three dimensions, based on spectroscopic or photometric redshifts. Results are dramatic: the intrinsic contamination of the low-redshift Sloan photometric redshift survey could be 80 times the lensing signal, but this can be almost completely removed, leaving random shot noise errors of the order of 10%. Intrinsic galaxy alignments, although an annoying contaminant for cosmic shear studies, are interesting in their own right, and we therefore present a new observational constraint for their amplitude from the aperture mass B-mode in the Red-Sequence Cluster Survey (RCS; Hoekstra, Yee & Gladders 2002b). The small measured B-mode rules out the published intrinsic alignment models from numerical simulations, which assume no evolution in galaxy clustering.
Factors associated with low adherence to medicine treatment for chronic diseases in Brazil

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE To analyze factors associated with low adherence to drug treatment for chronic diseases in Brazil. METHODS Analysis of data from Pesquisa Nacional sobre Acesso, Utilização e Promoção do Uso Racional de Medicamentos (PNAUM - Brazilian Survey on Access, Use and Promotion of Rational Use of Medicines), a population-based cross-sectional household survey, based on a probabilistic sample of the Brazilian population. We analyzed the association between low adherence to drug treatment measured by the Brief Medication Questionnaire and demographic, socioeconomic, health, care and prescription factors. We used Poisson regression model to estimate crude and adjusted prevalence ratios, their respective 95% confidence interval (95%CI) and p-value (Wald test). RESULTS The prevalence of low adherence to drug treatment for chronic diseases was 30.8% (95%CI 28.8-33.0). The highest prevalence of low adherence was associated with individuals: young adults; no education; resident in the Northeast and Midwest Regions of Brazil; paying part of the treatment; poor self-perceived health; three or more diseases; reported limitations caused by a chronic disease; using five drugs or more. CONCLUSIONS Low adherence to drug treatment for chronic diseases in Brazil is relevant, and regional and demographic differences and those related to patients’ health care and therapy regime require coordinated action between health professionals, researchers, managers and policy makers.
Towards Incremental Lexical Acquisition in HPSG

In this paper we present an implemented system for the incremental acquisition and revision of lexical entries in HPSG. As a byproduct of parsing, linguistic properties of unknown words are inferred from their sentential context. After parsing, the corresponding lexical entries are updated accordingly. A key idea of our approach is to employ a gradual, information-based concept of \unknownness", where lexical entries may contain unknown, i.e. revisable pieces of information. Re-visable information is further classiied into specializable and generalizable kinds. The overall approach is compatible with standard HPSG analyses and poses only a few extra demands on the grammar. These include marking revisable information with one of two distinguished formal types and specifying revisability clauses that provide access to the places of revisable information within the parse result. The update mechanism revises the corresponding places in the lexical feature structures ii the context actually provides new information. Revision translates to simple type intersection in the case of specializable information, whereas generalizable information requires type union. We demonstrate the inferential capacity of our system by illustrating in detail how verbal argument structure is incrementally acquired.
Cognition in action: imaging brain/body dynamics in mobile humans

Abstract We have recently developed a mobile brain imaging method (MoBI), that allows for simultaneous recording of brain and body dynamics of humans actively behaving in and interacting with their environment. A mobile imaging approach was needed to study cognitive processes that are inherently based on the use of human physical structure to obtain behavioral goals. This review gives examples of the tight coupling between human physical structure with cognitive processing and the role of supraspinal activity during control of human stance and locomotion. Existing brain imaging methods for actively behaving participants are described and new sensor technology allowing for mobile recordings of different behavioral states in humans is introduced. Finally, we review recent work demonstrating the feasibility of a MoBI system that was developed at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, demonstrating the range of behavior that can be investigated with this method.
A Cosmic-Ray Positron Anisotropy due to Two Middle-Aged, Nearby Pulsars?

Geminga and B0656+14 are the closest pulsars with characteristic ages in the range of 100 kyr to 1 Myr. They both have spin-down powers of the order 3 × 1034 ergs s−1 at present. The winds of these pulsars had most probably powered pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) that broke up less than about 100 kyr after the birth of the pulsars. Assuming that leptonic particles accelerated by the pulsars were confined in the PWNe and were released into the interstellar medium (ISM) on breakup of the PWNe, we show that, depending on the pulsar parameters, both pulsars make a nonnegligible contribution to the local cosmic ray (CR) positron spectrum, and they may be the main contributors above several GeV. The relatively small angular distance between Geminga and B0656+14 thus implies an anisotropy in the local CR positron flux at these energies. We calculate the contribution of these pulsars to the locally observed CR electron and positron spectra depending on the pulsar birth period and the magnitude of the local CR diffusion coefficient. We further give an estimate of the expected anisotropy in the local CR positron flux. Our calculations show that within the framework of our model, the local CR positron spectrum imposes constraints on pulsar parameters for Geminga and B0656+14, notably the pulsar period at birth, and also the local interstellar diffusion coefficient for CR leptons.
On the measurement of achievement goals: critique, illustration, and application

The authors identified several specific problems with the measurement of achievement goals in the current literature and illustrated these problems, focusing primarily on A. J. Elliot and H. A. McGregor's (2001) Achievement Goal Questionnaire (AGQ). They attended to these problems by creating the AGQ-Revised and conducting a study that examined the measure's structural validity and predictive utility with 229 (76 male, 150 female, 3 unspecified) undergraduates. The hypothesized factor and dimensional structures of the measure were confirmed and shown to be superior to a host of alternatives. The predictions were nearly uniformly supported with regard to both the antecedents (need for achievement and fear of failure) and consequences (intrinsic motivation and exam performance) of the 4 achievement goals. In discussing their work, the authors highlight the importance and value of additional precision in the area of achievement goal measurement.
Modified fast climbing search auto-focus algorithm with adaptive step size searching technique for digital camera

A practical real-time auto-focus algorithm for a digital camera is presented, and it improves the reliability and speed of the auto-focus process, especially suitable for a mega-pixel high definition camera. The proposed algorithm adopts threshold gradient and edge point count technique besides focus value function, instead of the traditional two-stage climbing search algorithm that uses the focus value function only. Additionally, a relative difference ratio circuit is also proposed, which can implement adaptive step size searching to increase the searching speed. By adopting the modified algorithm on the prototype of our mega-pixel digital camera, the real-time auto-focus function is verified. The proposed algorithm is implemented in a test camera chip that has been manufactured in 0.25/spl mu/m CMOS digital process.
TransLib: An Ada 95 Object Oriented Framework for Building Transactional Applications

TransLib is an Ada 95 object oriented framework to program fault-tolerant applications, more concretely, it allows to program transactional distributed applications. Transactions are one of the most widely used fault-tolerance mechanisms. They provide data consistency in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. One of the novelties of TransLib is that it uncouples concurrency control and recovery code from the code of data objects used by transactions. This feature enables to use regular objects in a transactional setting and vice versa what greatly improves reusability. TransLib provides commutativity-based locking, and di erent kinds of recovery. It also allows users to de ne their own recovery and concurrency control algorithms. Transactions and exceptions have been integrated in TransLib, that is, backward and forward recovery. In this integration, exceptions that cross transaction boundaries cause transaction abortion and transaction abortions are noti ed as exceptions. TransLib implements a new transactional model, Group Transactions, which integrates two existing fault tolerance techniques: transactions and process groups. In this transactional model transactions can be multitask and/or multi-process. A set of design patterns documents TransLib. Each one describes a component of TransLib architecture, such as recovery and concurrency control mechanisms. In this paper we describe the overall architecture of TransLib, as well as the design patterns that document it. Additionally, some aspects of the Ada 95 implementation are also discussed.
SubMito-PSPCP: Predicting Protein Submitochondrial Locations by Hybridizing Positional Specific Physicochemical Properties with Pseudoamino Acid Compositions

Knowing the submitochondrial location of a mitochondrial protein is an important step in understanding its function. We developed a new method for predicting protein submitochondrial locations by introducing a new concept: positional specific physicochemical properties. With the framework of general form pseudoamino acid compositions, our method used only about 100 features to represent protein sequences, which is much simpler than the existing methods. On the dataset of SubMito, our method achieved over 93% overall accuracy, with 98.60% for inner membrane, 93.90% for matrix, and 70.70% for outer membrane, which are comparable to all state-of-the-art methods. As our method can be used as a general method to upgrade all pseudoamino-acid-composition-based methods, it should be very useful in future studies. We implement our method as an online service: SubMito-PSPCP.
A DWT based reversible watermarking for lossless recovery

— A novel method for generic visible watermarking with a capability of lossless video recovery is proposed. The method is based on the use of deterministic one-to-one compound mappings of frame pixel values for overlaying a variety of visible watermarks of arbitrary sizes on cover videos. The compound mappings are proved to be reversible, which allows for lossless recovery of original video from watermarked video. The mappings may be adjusted to yield pixel values close to those of desired visible watermarks. The visible watermarks, the opaque monochrome watermark, are embedded as applications of the proposed generic approach. A DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) has been proposed to provide effective robustness for lossless recovery of video after applying DWT. Security protection measures by parameter and mapping randomizations have also been proposed to deter attackers on illicit image recoveries. Experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach are also included.
Scalable Inference for Nested Chinese Restaurant Process Topic Models

Nested Chinese Restaurant Process (nCRP) topic models are powerful nonparametric Bayesian methods to extract a topic hierarchy from a given text corpus, where the hierarchical structure is automatically determined by the data. Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation (hLDA) is a popular instance of nCRP topic models. However, hLDA has only been evaluated at small scale, because the existing collapsed Gibbs sampling and instantiated weight variational inference algorithms either are not scalable or sacrifice inference quality with mean-field assumptions. Moreover, an efficient distributed implementation of the data structures, such as dynamically growing count matrices and trees, is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel partially collapsed Gibbs sampling (PCGS) algorithm, which combines the advantages of collapsed and instantiated weight algorithms to achieve good scalability as well as high model quality. An initialization strategy is presented to further improve the model quality. Finally, we propose an efficient distributed implementation of PCGS through vectorization, pre-processing, and a careful design of the concurrent data structures and communication strategy. Empirical studies show that our algorithm is 111 times more efficient than the previous open-source implementation for hLDA, with comparable or even better model quality. Our distributed implementation can extract 1,722 topics from a 131-million-document corpus with 28 billion tokens, which is 4-5 orders of magnitude larger than the previous largest corpus, with 50 machines in 7 hours.
On modeling of coevolution of strategies and structure in autonomous overlay networks

Currently, on one hand, there exist much work about network formation and/or growth models, and on the other hand, cooperative strategy evolutions are extensively investigated in biological, economic, and social systems. Generally, overlay networks are heterogeneous, dynamic, and distributed environments managed by multiple administrative authorities, shared by users with different and competing interests, or even autonomously provided by independent and rational users. Thus, the structure of a whole overlay network and the peers' rational strategies are ever coevolving. However, there are very few approaches that theoretically investigate the coevolution between network structure and individual rational behaviors. The main motivation of our article lies in that: Unlike existing work which empirically illustrates the interaction between rational strategies and network structure (through simulations), based on EGT (Evolutionary Game Theory), we not only infer a condition that could favor the cooperative strategy over defect strategy, but also theoretically characterizes the structural properties of the formed network. Specifically, our contributions are twofold. First, we strictly derive the critical benefit-to-cost ratio (b/c) that would facilitate the evolution of cooperation. The critical ratio depends on the network structure (the number of peers in system and the average degree of each peer), and the evolutionary rule (the strategy and linking mutation probabilities). Then, according to the evolutionary rules, we formally derive the structural properties of the formed network in full cooperative state. Especially, the degree distribution is compatible with the power-law, and the exponent is (4-3v)/(1-3v), where v is peer's linking mutation probability. Furthermore, we show that, without being harmful to cooperation evolution, a slight change of the evolutionary rule will evolve the network into a small-world structure (high global efficiency and average clustering coefficient), with the same power-law degree distribution as in the original evolution model.
Computer aided diagnosis of CT focal liver lesions by an ensemble of neural network and statistical classifiers

A computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system for the characterization of hepatic tissue from computed tomography (CT) images is presented. Regions of interest (ROI's) corresponding to four types of hepatic tissue are drawn by an experienced radiologist on abdominal non-enhanced CT images. For each ROI, five sets of texture features are extracted and combined to provide input to the CAD system. If the dimensionality of a feature set is greater than a predefined threshold, appropriate feature selection based on a genetic algorithm (GA) is applied. Classification of the ROI is then carried out using an ensemble of classifiers consisting of two neural network (NN) and three statistical classifiers. The final decision of the CAD system is based on the application of a voting scheme across the outputs of the primary classifiers of the ensemble. A classification performance of the order of 90.63% was finally achieved.
Noncompetitive immunoassay detection system for haptens on the basis of antimetatype antibodies.

BACKGROUND Small molecules classified as haptens are generally measured by competitive immunoassay, which is theoretically inferior to noncompetitive sandwich immunoassay in terms of sensitivity and specificity. We created a method for developing sandwich immunoassays to measure haptens on the basis of antimetatype antibodies. METHODS We generated antimetatype monoclonal antibodies against a hapten-antibody immunocomplex using an ex vivo antibody development system, the Autonomously Diversifying Library (ADLib) system. We selected 2 haptens, estradiol (E2) and 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], as analytes. Sandwich immunoassays for these 2 haptens were developed by use of a 96-well microtiter plate and a fully automated chemiluminescence analyzer, and the performances of these immunoassays were investigated. RESULTS The developed assays exhibited sensitivity high enough to detect target haptens in serum samples. The limit of detection of the ELISA for E2 was 3.13 pg/mL, and that of the fully automated chemiluminescent enzyme immunoassay (CLEIA) system was 2.1 ng/mL for 25(OH)D. The cross-reactivity with immunoreactive derivatives was effectively improved compared with the competitive assay. The CVs for the sandwich ELISA for E2 were 4.2%-12.6% (intraassay) and 6.2%-21.8% (total imprecision). The CVs for the sandwich CLEIA for 25(OH)D were 1.0%-2.3% (intraassay) and 1.9%-3.5% (total imprecision). In particular, the sandwich CLEIA for 25(OH)D showed correlations of r = 0.99 with both LC-MS/MS and a commercially available (125)I RIA. CONCLUSIONS Our method represents a potentially simple and practical approach for routine assays of haptens, including vitamins, hormones, drugs, and toxins.
Clathrin facilitates the internalization of seven transmembrane segment receptors for mating pheromones in yeast

The role of clathrin in endocytosis of the yeast phermone receptors was examined using strains expressing a temperature-sensitive clathrin heavy chain. The yeast phermone receptors belong to the family of seven transmembrane segment, G-protein-coupled receptors. A rapid and reversible defect in uptake of radiolabeled alpha-factor pheromone occurred when the cells were transferred to the nonpermissive temperature. Constitutive, pheromone-independent internalization of newly synthesized a-factor phermone receptor was also rapidly inhibited in mutant strains at the nonpermissive temperature. In both cases residual endocytosis, 30-50% of wild-type levels, was detected in the absence of functional clathrin heavy chain. Once internalized, the a- factor receptor was delivered to the vacuole at comparable rates in chc1-ts and wild-type cells at the nonpermissive temperature. Clathrin heavy chain was also required for maximal uptake of a mutant a-factor receptor which is dependent on pheromone for internalization. In the presence of a-factor, the internalization rate of the mutant receptor in chc1-ts cells at the nonpermissive temperature was 2.5 times slower than the rate observed for endocytosis of the mutant receptor in wild- type cells. These experiments provide in vivo evidence that clathrin plays an important role in the endocytosis of the seven trans-membrane segment pheromone receptors in yeast.
Finding the needle in the heap: combining static analysis and dynamic symbolic execution to trigger use-after-free

This paper presents a fully automated technique to find and trigger Use-After-Free vulnerabilities (UAF) on binary code. The approach combines a static analyzer and a dynamic symbolic execution engine. We also introduce several original heuristics for the dynamic symbolic execution part, speeding up the exploration and making this combination effective in practice. The tool we developed is open-source, and it has successfully been applied on real world vulnerabilities. As an example, we detail a proof-of-concept exploit triggering a previously unknown vulnerability on JasPer leading to the CVE-2015-5221.
ROI encryption for the HEVC coded video contents

In this paper we investigate privacy protection for the HEVC standard based on the tile concept. Tiles in HEVC enable the video to be split into independent rectangular regions. Two solutions are proposed to encrypt the tiles containing the Region Of Interest (ROI). The first solution performs encryption at the bitstream level by encrypting all HEVC syntax elements within the ROI tiles. The second solution enables a selective encryption of the ROI tiles under constant bitrate and format compliant requirements. To avoid temporal propagation of the encryption outside the ROI boundaries caused by inter prediction, the motion vectors of non ROI regions are restricted inside the non encrypted tiles in the reference frames. Simulation results show that the proposed solutions perform secure and adaptive encryption of ROI in the HEVC video. Moreover, the bitrate overhead caused by the MVs restriction window varies between 1%-2.5% depending on both the video content and the number of tiles within the frame.