Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The efficiency of optimal sampling in the random S-box model

In this paper we show a closed caption formula for the efficiency of the optimal sampling technique in the random S-box model. This formula is derived by analyzing the given model and sampling technique using statistical techniques. We further generalize the original random S-box model in two ways; allowing multiple-bit entries, xor of several random S-box outputs. For all cases we show the corresponding closed caption efficiency formula. Using these new formulas, it is now possible to instantaneously give accurate analytical estimates of the output quality of random S-boxes. This can be of great practical importance in, for example, analysis and design of cryptographic primitives based on such building blocks.
Extensive Imitation is Irrational and Harmful

Rationality leads people to imitate those with similar tastes but different information. But people who imitate common sources develop correlated beliefs, and rationality demands that later social learners take this redundancy into account. This implies severe limits to rational imitation. We show that (i) in most natural observation structures besides the canonical single-file case, full rationality dictates that people must \anti-imitate" some of those they observe; and (ii) in every observation structure full rationality dictates that people who do not anti-imitate can, in essence, imitate at most one person among predecessors who share common information. We also show that in a very broad class of settings, virtually any learning rule in which people regularly do imitate more than one person without anti-imitating others will lead to a positive (and, in some environments, arbitrarily high) probability of people converging to confident and wrong long-run beliefs. When testing either the rationality or the efficiency of social learning, researchers should not focus on whether people follow others' behaviour but instead whether they follow it too much.
Cyclooxygenase Inhibition during Allergic Sensitization Increases STAT6-Independent Primary and Memory Th2 Responses1

Immune sensitization and memory generation are required for the development of allergic inflammation. Our previous studies demonstrate that the cyclooxygenase (COX) metabolic pathway is actively involved in allergic responses and COX inhibition increases allergic airway inflammation in a STAT6-independent fashion. To test the hypothesis that COX inhibition augments allergic inflammation by enhancing immune sensitization and memory, we sensitized STAT6 knockout mice with an i.p. injection of OVA with aluminum hydroxide as an adjuvant and treated the mice with the COX inhibitor indomethacin or vehicle for analyses of the primary and memory immune responses. We found that COX inhibition during immune sensitization, but not the allergic challenge phase, was necessary and sufficient to increase allergic inflammation. COX inhibition during sensitization increased the numbers of mature dendritic cells and activated CD4 T cells in the spleen and augmented OVA-specific IL-5 and IL-13 responses of the splenic CD4 T cells at day 5 after sensitization. COX inhibition during sensitization also augmented allergic Th2 response to OVA challenge 90 days after the sensitization. Therefore, COX inhibition during allergic sensitization augments allergic responses by enhancing Th2 cell activation and memory generation and the proallergic effect is STAT6-independent. These findings provide a mechanistic explanation for the increased allergic inflammation previously shown in the mice treated with COX inhibitors and in COX-deficient mice and suggest that use of COX-inhibiting drugs during initial allergen exposure may increase the risk of developing allergic responses.
Effects of a 1080 operation on kaka and kereru survival and nesting success, Whirinaki Forest Park

To measure the costs and benefits of an aerial 1080 possum control operation to kereru and kaka in Whirinaki Forest Park, individuals of both species were radio-tagged from October 1998 to June 2002. We monitored birds in one treatment and one non-treatment study area to compare toxin-related mortality, nesting success and survival. The poison operation involved the spreading of non-toxic carrot baits on 1 May 2000, and the toxic baits on 17/18 May 2000. Possums and rats were moderately abundant in both study areas prior to the poison operation, but afterwards few possums and rats remained in the treatment area. All radio-tagged kaka and kereru in the treatment area survived the poison operation. No radio-tagged kereru and too few radio-tagged kaka bred in either study area during the 2000/01 nesting season to show whether reduced possum and rat populations would enable the birds to nest more successfully. A reduction in possum and rat densities in the non-treatment area (and an increase in densities in the treatment area) during 2001/02 meant that during the second nesting season after the poison operation, possum and rat densities were similar in the two study areas. The nesting effort and success of kaka and kereru is described for each of four nesting seasons, with the main cause of nesting failure for both species being predation. While no radio-tagged adult male kaka died during the study, 6 females did, giving them a mean life expectancy of 9.5 years. In contrast, radio-tagged adult kereru suffered high mortality, resulting in a mean life expectancy of just 1.5 years. Predation by introduced mammalian predators was the main cause of mortality of kaka eggs, chicks, fledglings and adult females, and of kereru eggs, chicks, fledglings and adults. Effective control of introduced mammalian predators, including control by aerial 1080 operations, just before mast fruiting events that invariably promote prolific kaka and kereru breeding, should benefit these bird
The Seal of Biliteracy: Adding students’ voices to the conversation

ABSTRACT The Seal of Biliteracy (SoBL) is a policy that recognizes biliterate high school graduates with an emblem placed on their diploma or transcript signifying proficiency in two or more languages. The present study focused on 12th grade students’ perceptions of the SoBL to investigate the questions: How do students perceive bilingualism and biliteracy? What do students perceive as benefits of the SoBL? What do students perceive as barriers to greater attainment of the SoBL? Implications focus on how to expand access to the SoBL to both English-dominant and linguistically diverse students.
Bias-Corrected Matching Estimators for Average Treatment Effects

In Abadie and Imbens (2006), it was shown that simple nearest-neighbor matching estimators include a conditional bias term that converges to zero at a rate that may be slower than N1/2. As a result, matching estimators are not N1/2-consistent in general. In this article, we propose a bias correction that renders matching estimators N1/2-consistent and asymptotically normal. To demonstrate the methods proposed in this article, we apply them to the National Supported Work (NSW) data, originally analyzed in Lalonde (1986). We also carry out a small simulation study based on the NSW example. In this simulation study, a simple implementation of the bias-corrected matching estimator performs well compared to both simple matching estimators and to regression estimators in terms of bias, root-mean-squared-error, and coverage rates. Software to compute the estimators proposed in this article is available on the authors’ web pages (http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/imbens/software.html) and documented in Abadie et al. (2003).
Environmental Impact of Manufacturing Softwood Lumber in Northeastern and North Central United States

Finding the environmental impact of building materials is becoming increasingly more important because of public environmental awareness. Accurate and precise life-cycle inventory data on wood products are needed to meet this demand. This study examined softwood lumber manufacturing in the northeastern and north central US using life-cycle inventory methods. Material flow, energy type, and energy use were identified for these sawmills. A softwood log mass conversion of 42.1% to planed dry lumber was found. Values of 355 MJ of electricity and 2730 MJ of processed energy per cubic meter were determined for manufacturing planed dry softwood lumber burning mostly green wood residues on- site for energy. Biomass and fossil carbon dioxide production of 187 and 65.1 kg/m 3 , respectively, were estimated. Lowering energy consumption would be of great benefit to the mills, and thus society, in reducing the environmental burden, especially in sawing and drying.
A Two-Paper Conceptualization of Safety After Sexual Assault: The Case of Edith

Establishing safety after a sexual assault is a central task of clinical social work with survivors of sexual violence. These two papers seek to build the argument that the concept of safety for survivors of sexual assault is profoundly nuanced and dependent upon a person’s unique history, personality, and life circumstances, and that the establishment of safety for a survivor of sexual assault requires precise clinical attention to each individual. This theoretical-conceptual dissertation first explores the trauma treatment literature and the ways that safety is understood and prioritized, followed by a discussion of additional theoretical frameworks that can strengthen a clinical conceptualization of safety for survivors of sexual assault. This dissertation asserts that social work is uniquely positioned to attend to the construction of safety through its consideration of the impact of resource insecurity, and social disparities such as sexism, racism, and homophobia on a person’s psyche. Using the case of Edith, the author will demonstrate the importance of an internal sense of safety in the mind of a survivor. With attention to the ethical implications of case writing with regard to Edith’s confidentiality and consent, this dissertation uses a case study methodology to demonstrate a clinical conceptualization of safety after sexual assault relying upon the theoretical frameworks discussed. The description of the case of Edith focuses on the ways in which her character construction, attachment history, and current relational patterns are central to her experience of safety after a sexual assault. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Social Work (DSW) First Advisor Jane Abrams Second Advisor Lina Hartocollis
Trace-driven simulation of data alignment and other factors affecting update and invalidate based coherent memory

The exploitation of locality of reference in shared memory multiprocessors is one of the most important problems in parallel processing today. Locality can be managed in several levels: hardware, operating system, runtime environment of the compiler, and user level. In this paper we investigate the problem of exploiting locality at the operating system level and its interactions with the compiler and the architecture. Our main conclusion, based on trace-driven simulations of real applications, is that exploitation of locality is effective only if all three levels cooperate. <<ETX>>
Technology Adoption and Innovation in Public Services: The Case of E-Government in Italy

Using data from 1176 Italian municipalities in 2005, we identify factors associated with the development of e-government services supplied by local public administrations (PAs). We show that the combination of internal competencies and context-specific factors is different when explaining decisions to start e-government activities vs. the intensity of such activities. Municipalities involved in e-government are larger, carry out more in-house ICT activities and are more likely to have intranet infrastructures than PAs that do not offer front-office digitized services. They are also generally located in regions having relatively large shares of firms using or producing ICTs, where many other municipalities offer digitized services, and where population density is relatively low. The range and quality of e-government services supplied by local PAs tend to increase with their stock of ICT competencies, their efforts to train workers, and with their ability to organise efficient interfaces with end-users. Moreover, there is a correlation between the range and quality of e-government services offered and the broadband infrastructure development in the area where local PAs are located.
The nature of credit risk : the effect of maturity , type of obligor , and country of domicile

AN INCREASING amount of research on credit risk is being carried out within financial firms, central banks, regulators, and universities. In the case of firms, the chief aim is to improve pricing of credit exposures and to create better systems for internal capital allocation. The authorities are motivated by the objective of developing regulatory capital requirements for credit books more closely aligned to risk than the arrangements set out in the 1988 Basel Accord. With the present broadbrush requirements the authorities can be less confident that firms are carrying adequate capital to cover their risks, with clear implications for financial stability. Also the closer the capital requirements are to the actual risks entailed in various exposures, the fewer the distortionary effects on behaviour and the less the effect on general economic efficiency.
Power Estimation Under User-Specified Input Sequences and Programs

We describe an approach to estimate the average power dissipation in sequential logic circuits under user-specified input sequences or programs. This approach will aid the design of programmable controllers or processors, by enabling the estimation of the power dissipated when the controller or processor is running specific application programs. Current approaches to sequential circuit power estimation are limited by the fact that the input sequences to the sequential circuit are assumed to be uncorrelated. In reality, the inputs come from other sequential circuits, or are application programs. In this paper we show how user-specified sequences and programs can be modeled using a finite state machine, termed an input-modeling finite state machines or IMFSM. Power estimation can be carried out using existing sequential circuit power estimation methods on a cascade circuit consisting of the IMFSM and the original sequential circuit.
More wages, more income, more leisure? Evidence from Thailand’s time use survey

ABSTRACT Does more income mean more leisure? This paper investigates the impact of wages and income on leisure time using merged data from two nationally representative samples in Thailand: (1) the Time Use Survey, and (2) the Labor Force Survey. Results will depend on our definition of income or wages. The data indicate that Thai people tend to reduce their leisure time in response to monthly income changes. The reason for such a negative relationship is that monthly income is composed of extra income other than wages, for example, overtime and bonus pay, which are found to be inversely related to leisure time. However, when the relationship between leisure time and hourly wage is estimated, we find that an increase in hourly wage substantially and significantly induces people to engage in more leisure and that a percentage change in hourly wage also provides a positive percentage change in leisure time.
Dynamic complexity: recent updates

In many data management scenarios the data is subject to frequent modifications, and it is often essential to react to those changes quickly. When a train is canceled on short notice, travelers need to find alternative connections as fast as possible. When a web server is temporarily not available, data packages have to be rerouted immediately.
Ambulatory real-time micro-sensor motion capture

Commercial optical human motion capture systems perform well in studio-like environments, but they do not provide solution in daily-life surroundings. Micro-sensor motion capture has shown its potentials because of its ubiquity and low cost. We present an ambulatory low-cost real-time motion capture system using wearable micro-sensors (accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes), which can capture and reconstruct human motion in real-time almost everywhere. It mainly consists of three parts: a sensor subsystem, a data fusion subsystem and an animation subsystem. The sensor subsystem collects human motion signals and transfers them into the data fusion subsystem. The data fusion subsystem performs sensor fusion to obtain motion information, i.e., the orientation and position of each body segment. Using the motion information from the data fusion subsystem, the animation subsystem drives the avatar in the 3D virtual world in order to reconstruct human motion. All the processes are accomplished in real-time. The experimental results show that our system can capture motions and drive animations in real-time vividly without drift and delay. And the output from our system can be made use of in film-making, sports training and argument reality applications, etc.
A first-order fine-grained multithreaded throughput model

Analytical modeling is an alternative to detailed performance simulation with the potential to shorten the development cycle and provide additional insights. This paper proposes analytical models for predicting the cache contention and throughput of heavily multithreaded architectures such as Sun Microsystems' Niagara. First, it proposes a novel probabilistic model to accurately predict the number of extra cache misses due to cache contention for significantly larger numbers of threads than possible with prior analytical cache contention models. Then it presents a Markov chain model for analytically estimating the throughput of multicore, fine-grained multithreaded architectures. The Markov model uses the number of stalled threads as the states and calculates transition probabilities based upon the rates and latencies of events stalling a thread. By modeling the overlapping of the stalls among threads and taking account of cache contention our models accurately predict system throughput obtained from a cycle-accurate performance simulator with an average error of 7.9%. We also demonstrate the application of our model to a design problem—optimizing the design of fine-grained multithreaded chip multiprocessors for application-specific workloads—yielding the same result as detailed simulations 65 times faster. Moreover, this paper shows that our models accurately predict cache contention and throughput trends across varying workloads on real hardware—a Sun Fire T1000 server.
Robust Deep Appearance Models

This paper presents a novel Robust Deep Appearance Models (RDAMs) approach to learn the non-linear correlation between shape and texture of face images. In this approach, two crucial components of face images, i.e. shape and texture, are represented by Deep Boltzmann Machines and Robust Deep Boltzmann Machines (RDBM), respectively. The RDBM, an alternative form of Robust Boltzmann Machines, can separate corrupted/occluded pixels in the texture modeling to achieve better reconstruction results. The two models are connected by Restricted Boltzmann Machines at the top layer to jointly learn and capture the variations of both facial shapes and appearances. This paper also introduces new fitting algorithms with occlusion awareness through the mask obtained from the RDBM reconstruction. The proposed approach is evaluated in various applications by using challenging face datasets, i.e. Labeled Face Parts in the Wild (LFPW), Helen, EURECOM and AR databases, to demonstrate its robustness and capabilities.
Music Structural Segmentation Across Genres with Gammatone Features

Music structural segmentation (MSS) studies to date mainly employ audio features describing the timbral, harmonic or rhythmic aspects of the music and are evaluated using datasets consisting primarily of Western music. A new dataset of Chinese traditional Jingju music with structural annotations is introduced in this paper to complement the existing evaluation framework. We discuss some statistics of the annotations analysing the inter-annotator agreements. We present two auditory features derived from the Gammatone ﬁlters based respectively on the cepstral analysis and the spectral contrast description. The Gammatone features and two commonly used features, Mel-frequency cepstral coefﬁcients (MFCCs) and chromagram, are evaluated on the Jingju dataset as well as two existing used ones using several state-of-the-art algorithms. The investigated Gammatone features outperform MFCCs and chro-magram when evaluated on the Jingju dataset and show similar performance with the Western datasets. We identify the presented Gammatone features as effective structure descriptors, especially for music lacking notable tim-bral or harmonic sectional variations. Results also indicate that the design of audio features and segmentation algorithms should be adapted to speciﬁc music genres to interpret individual structural patterns.
Example based skinning with progressively optimized support joints

Skeleton-Subspace Deformation (SSD), which is the most popular method for articulated character animation, often causes some artifacts. Animators have to edit mesh each time, which is seriously tedious and time-consuming. So example based skinning has been proposed. It employs edited mesh as target poses and generates plausible animation efficiently. In this technique, character mesh should be deformed to accurately fit target poses. Mohr et al. [2003] introduced additional joints. They expect animators to embed skeleton precisely.
DDSS : Dynamic Dedicated Servers Scheduling for Multi Priority Level Classes in Cloud Servers

Simplicity of usage, flexibility of data access, ease of maintenance, time and energy efficiency, and pay as you go policy have increased the usage of cloud computing over traditional computing. Cloud computing should be able to meet the performance expectations of different class of customers. On the contrary, inefficient scheduling algorithms decrease the quality of service experienced by users. To improve quality of service, there are several proposed scheduling algorithms in the literature. However, these scheduling algorithms are limited because of not considering different types of customers. Our objective is to satisfy performance expectations of these types of customers by proposing an efficient Dynamic Dedicated Server Scheduling (DDSS) while considering different types of customers. Results show that the customer drop rate and throughput can be significantly improved by DDSS. Our proposed scheduling and related analysis will help cloud service providers build efficient cloud computing service architectures through considering different types of priority class performances such as, drop rate, throughput, and utilization.
Six Methodsfor IsolatingHigh-DensityLipoproteinCompared , with Use of the ReferenceMethodfor QuantifyingCholesterolin Serum

CLIN. CHEM. 31/5, 746-750 (1985) flexible gas chromatograph-masspectrometer-computer search systemto identify drugs and their metabolites in body fluids of overdosevictims. Clin Chem 20, 255-265 (1974). 17. FinkleBS, Foltz RL, Taylor DM. A comprehensive CC-MS reference data systemfor toxicological and biomedical purposes. J Chromatogr Sci 12, 304-328 (1974). 18. Foltz RL. Mass spectrometry. Op.cit. (ref. 9), pp 1-30.