Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PCA-subspace method — Is it good enough for network-wide anomaly detection

PCA-subspace method has been proposed for network-wide anomaly detection. Normal subspace contamination is still a great challenge for PCA although some methods are proposed to reduce the contamination. In this paper, we apply PCA-subspace method to six-month Origin-Destination (OD) flow data from the Abilene. The result shows that normal subspace contamination is mainly caused by anomalies from a few strongest OD flows, and seems unavoidable for subspace method. Further comparison of anomalies detected by subspace method and manually tagged anomalies from each OD flows, we find that anomalies detected by subspace method are mainly caused by anomalies from medium and a few large OD flows, and most anomalies of minor OD flows are buried in abnormal subspace and hard to be detected by PCA-subspace method. We analyze the reason for those anomalies undetected by subspace method and suggest to use normal subspace to detect anomalies caused by a few strongest OD flows, and to further divide abnormal subspace to detect more anomalies from minor OD flows. The goal of this paper is to address limitations neglected by prior works and further improve the subspace method on one hand, also call for novel detection methods for network-wide traffic on another hand.
Results of a LMXB survey: Variation in the height of the neutron star blackbody emission region

We present results of a survey of the spectra of Low Mass X-ray Binaries using ASCA . It is shown that all sources in the survey are well-fitted by the same two-component emission model that we have previously shown is able to describe both the non-dip and dip spectra of the dipping class of LMXB. This model consists of point-like blackbody emission from the neutron star plus Comptonized emission from a disk-like accretion disk corona of radius typically 50 000 km. Additional data from results published elsewhere by us from BeppoSAX and ASCA are added to the survey. The large variation in blackbody luminosity of survey sources is shown to be due primarily to major changes in blackbody emitting area. Fitting a multi-temperature disk blackbody plus Comptonization model to the survey spectra requires values of inner disk radius substantially less than the neutron star radius in many cases, making disk origin of the blackbody highly unlikely. Assuming that the emission is from an equatorial strip on the neutron star, it is shown that the half-height of the strip h agrees well with the half-height H of the radiatively-supported inner accretion disk, this agreement spanning three orders of magnitude in each parameter. Possible mechanisms for the agreement are discussed, including radial accretion flow between inner disk and star, and accretion flow "creep"on the surface of the neutron star.
On Traffic Characteristics of a Broadband Wireless Internet Access

Internet traffic measurements and traffic characterization are essential for managing and optimizing network infrastructures. The increasing number of wireless Internet users and the changing application demands require consecutive traffic measurements. Therefore, we have performed measurements of home users at a broadband wireless access service provider in order to reflect the current traffic characteristics. In this paper, we present the results of these measurements like application distributions as well as changing traffic characteristics caused by user demands and new services. The results could be used by a network service provider to optimize its network performance in order to give Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for home users in its fixed wireless network.
Reading performance in glaucoma

detailed profile of CH, CRF, CCT, IOPcc, IOPg, and IOP GAT in both groups is depicted in Table 1. In the GD group, positive and significant correlations were observed between CRF and CCT (r = +0.438, p = 0.032) and between CH and CCT (r = +0.486, p = 0.016). The principal finding of this study is that patients with GD present significantly higher values of CH and CRF than healthy subjects. Recently, Ozkok et al. (2014) have showed that CH and CRF are higher in acromegalic patients than in healthy subjects. Our group has reported that treatment with thyroxine supplementation may improve corneal biomechanics in patients with GD (Gatzioufas et al. 2014). On the other hand, no significant differences in CCT values were observed between GD and control group. This finding is in agreement with a previous report (Konuk et al. 2008). Similarly, significant positive correlation between CH and CRF values and CCT was reported in acromegalic patients (Ozkok et al. 2014). GD-associated ophthalmopathy is an inflammatory disease of the orbital tissues. The effects of inflammation, mediated through cytokine release, include proliferation of fibroblasts, increased deposition of extracellular matrix, and adipocyte differentiation and proliferation in the orbital space (Hatton & Rubin 2002). We assume that oedema, enlargement of the extraocular muscles and increased volume of the orbital soft tissues may account for the modified biomechanical behaviour of the globe, as reflected by the corneal biomechanics. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the corneal biomechanics in patients with GD. We report higher CH and CRF values in cases with GD without CCT changes. These modifications may also have an impact on the measurement of IOP in patients with GD. Therefore, ophthalmologists should be aware of the corneal biomechanical variations in these patients.
Cloud Cosmology : Building the Web Interface for iCosmo

Astronomy and cosmology have embraced the internet. We routinely and successfully use the internet as a repository for sharing code, publications and information, and as a computational resource. However the interactive nature of the web, for use as an alternative to downloading code has been largely overlooked. In this article we will outline a simple framework in which a cosmological code can be turned into an interactive web interface. This is presented as a result of creating this http URL which is a front-end for the open-source software iCosmo. We explain how an HTML page can be created and how a cosmological code can be incorporated into a web environment using CGI scripts. We outline how plots and downloadable text can be made, and describe how help and documentation can be created. By using simple HTML and CGI scripts a basic web interface for any cosmological code can be created easily. We provide a worked example of the methods outlined, which can be used as a simple template by any researcher who wants to share their work online.
Speeding up audio fingerprinting over GPUs

This paper presents the use of GPUs (graphic processing units) for implementing an efficient audio fingerprinting (AFP) system for audio music retrieval. Such a music retrieval system can compare a 10-second recording of exact but noisy audio clip to the database of more than 100K songs on a single PC with GPU cards. Due to the use of GPUs, we can achieve a speedup factor of 14 for audio comparison, leading to a satisfactory response time for a practical AFP service. In order to squeeze the computing power out of GPU, we have tried detailed performance analysis to find the best memory usage strategy and the corresponding optimum GPU parameters. As far as we know, this is the first technical paper covering the detailed use and analysis of GPU for audio fingerprinting over a database of more than 100K songs. The resulting system, now with around 203K songs, has been successful deployed on the web for public access.
Teacher research : the benefits and the pitfalls

The aim of this study was to document teacher-research that occurred during a yearlong investigation into student writing in science. The focus was on writing skills and how students use them to express their understanding of scientific concepts. It was proposed that a prolonged engagement with a Year 8 science class would lead to a better understanding of how students view and use their writing to demonstrate their knowledge of scientific concepts. This information would then be used to develop teaching strategies that could improve these students’ written expression of their knowledge.
Java Visual Speech Components for Rapid Application Development of GUI Based Speech Processing Applications

In this paper, we describe a new Java framework for an easy and efficient way of developing new GUI based speech processing applications. Standard components are provided to display the speech signal, the power plot, and the spectrogram. Furthermore, a component to create a new transcription and to display and manipulate an existing transcription is provided, as well as a component to display and manually correct external pitch values. These Swing components can be easily embedded into own Java programs. They can be synchronized to display the same region of the speech file. The object-oriented design provides base classes for rapid development of own components.
Evaluation of Guest Feedback Channels in China Hotels

Through systematically collecting, analyzing, and disseminating guest feedback information about their ever changing needs and wants as well as about any service failures that occur, the guest feedback system can be a very useful tool for hotel management. The data collected can be utilized by hotels to enhance quality, locate quality problems, and develop improvement procedures. This study attempts to explore guests' evaluations of guest feedback channels in China's hotels. Data were collected from 248 hotel guests at six hotels in China. Results reveal that the guest comment card is the most commonly used feedback channel by hotel guests and guest contact staff is perceived to be the most effective among all feedback channels. The results could have important implications for China's hotels when they try to develop successful guest feedback systems for their respective hotels.
A New Call Admission Control Mechanism for Multimedia Traffic over Next-Generation Wireless Cellular Networks

The subject of Call Admission Control (CAC) for wireless networks has been studied extensively in the literature. Another subject on which many researchers have focused their attention is that of video traffic modeling. However, user mobility, combined with the rapidly growing number of "greedy" multimedia applications, in terms of bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, form a challenging and yet unresolved problem for third and fourth-generation wireless networks. In recent work, we have built a Discrete Autoregressive (DAR (1)) model to capture the behavior of multiplexed H.263 videoconference movies from variable bit rate (VBR) coders. Based on this model, we propose in this work a new efficient CAC scheme for wireless cellular networks, which differs from the existing proposals in the literature in that it uses precomputed traffic scenarios combined with online simulation for its decision making. Our scheme is shown, via an extensive simulation study comparison and a conceptual comparison with well-known existing approaches, to clearly excel in terms of QoS provisioning to users receiving videoconference videoconference and Web traffic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the relevant literature where such an approach has been proposed.
Living with less as a transformation process: A qualitative study of consumer behavior reform through spending reduction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the Transformation Model Living with Less, for possible use in consumer behavior research and marketing research.Design/methodology/approach – The model resulted from the phenomenological field research which was conducted among 15 voluntary and involuntary downshifters. The study used an experiential point of view, inquiring about concrete experiences and practices following a financial decrease of at least 20 percent.Findings – Results indicated a consistent pattern of change independent of voluntary or involuntary downshifting, or of the amount of reduction. The study also found that living with less was primarily a life matter instead of a purely financial matter: reorganizing expenses meant reorganizing life. The resulting Transformation Model is a prototypical reconstruction of this multi‐layered change process.Practical implications – The model may offer an interesting direction for future research, either applied, or theoretical. The de.
TC-1 Overexpression Promotes Cell Proliferation in Human Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer that Can Be Inhibited by PD173074

Thyroid cancer-1 (TC-1), a natively disordered protein, is widely expressed in vertebrates and overexpressed in many kinds of tumors. However, its exact role and regulation mechanism in human non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are still unclear. In the present study, we found that TC-1 is highly expressed in NSCLC and that its aberrant expression is strongly associated with NSCLC cell proliferation. Exogenous TC-1 overexpression promotes cell proliferation, accelerates the cell G1-to-S-phase transition, and reduces apoptosis in NSCLC. The knockdown of TC-1, however, inhibits NSCLC cell proliferation, cycle transition, and apoptosis resistance. Furthermore, we also demonstrated that PD173074, which functions as an inhibitor of the TC-1 in NSCLC, decreases the expression of TC-1 and inhibits TC-1 overexpression mediated cell proliferation in vitro and in vivo. Nevertheless, the inhibition function of PD173074 on NSCLC cell proliferation was eliminated in cells with TC-1 knockdown. These results suggest that PD173074 plays a significant role in TC-1 overexpression mediated NSCLC cell proliferation and may be a potential intervention target for the prevention of cell proliferation in NSCLC.
A GPU accelerated real-time self-contained visual navigation system for UAVs

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of using geo-referenced aerial images to augment an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation system in case of GPS failure. The proposed method is based on image matching between the current view from a monocular video camera and a previously known database of geo-referenced images. Only natural landmarks provided by a feature tracking algorithm will be considered, without the help of visual beacons or artificial landmarks. The novel idea is to perform global localization, position tracking, localization failure recovery and safe landing. Key points of current video frame and reference database are extracted by implementing Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm on a NVIDIA Geforce 240M graphics processing unit (GPU). The proposed system has been tested on real flight data and testing results confirmed that the proposed system is real-time and sufficiently robust to scale, rotation, illumination, noise and affine projection, thus it can be an ideal scheme for autonomous navigation system for UAVs under GPS blockage conditions.
Special Issue Linking Hypotheses in Visual Neuroscience: a Tribute to Davida Teller Development of Face Discrimination Abilities, and Relationship to Magnocellular Pathway Development, between Childhood and Adulthood

Davida Teller used to say that the fi eld of visual development can be much more than simply showing that babies do not see well and then get better as they age. Developmental research, when done rigorously, can reveal much about the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception, and Davida was a master at articulating the rules for these " linking propositions " (Teller, 1982 , 1984). For example, Davida and others have pointed out that if different aspects of visual processing show different developmental trajectories, it is reasonable to conclude that those aspects of visual processing are subserved by different neural mechanisms. The converse, however , is not necessarily true; if different aspects of visual processing show similar developmental trajectories, those aspects of visual processing may or may not be subserved by different neural mechanisms. In a tribute to Davida and her contributions to the fi eld of linking propositions, we present data from a study we conducted that investigated the developmental trajectories of face and nonface object processing between childhood and adulthood. Despite the fact that there are several studies showing developmental changes in face processing over the course of a lifetime (see Germine et al., 2011 , for review), we felt that some basic questions about face discrimination using carefully controlled stimuli were in need. As a brief background to the topic of face development, the ability to process faces occurs very soon after birth, with newborns displaying looking preferences for faces over objects and mother's over stranger's face (reviewed in McKone et al., 2009 ; Pascalis et al., 2011). By preschool (∼ age 3–4 years), children appear to engage the same processing mechanisms as adults and encode faces relative to a norm (Jeffery et al., 2010 ; Short et al., 2011) in a framework that represents faces as points in a multi-dimensional psychological face space (Tanaka et al., 2011). Despite this adult-like encoding at a relatively early age, many age-related improvements in face processing have been documented, including improvements in: (1) face recognition accuracy the complexity of holistic face percepts (i.e., integration of the facial features with their spatial arrangement and the external contour of the face, and more specifically , the amount of detail represented in this integrated face percept) (4) selectivity for upright faces , as measured by the size of face inversion effects (age 2–6 years: Abstract The current study tested the development of …
Performance Evaluation of Portable Concrete Barriers

The primary purpose of longitudinal safety barriers, such as Portable Concrete Barriers (PCBs), is to contain and/or redirect errant vehicles that depart the roadway, hence keeping them from entering opposing travel lanes or encountering terrain features and roadside objects that may cause severe impacts. In this study Finite Element (FE) analyses are performed to study the safety performance of different combinations of PCBs. Detailed finite element models of most commonly used PCB safety shapes, lengths and the type of connections are developed and validated against previously conducted full-scale crash tests. The full-scale crash tests and simulations are setup for an impact of the PCB with a 2000 kg pickup truck at an angle of 25 deg and an initial velocity of 100 km/hr. This setup is in accordance with the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 350 guidelines for Test Level 3 safety performance. Having validated these models, computer simulations are performed to assess the barrier performances for a full matrix of barrier shape, length and connection combinations. A design table is developed to help the highway safety engineer decide on the most effective combination.
The source altitude, electric current, and intrinsic brightness of terrestrial gamma ray flashes

Many details of how thunderstorms generate terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs) and other forms of high‐energy radiation remain uncertain, including the basic question of where they are produced. We exploit the association of distinct low‐frequency radio emissions with generation of terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs) to directly measure for the first time the TGF source altitude. Analysis of two events reveals source altitudes of 11.8 ± 0.4 km and 11.9 ± 0.9 km. This places the source region in the interior of the thunderstorm between the two main charge layers and implies an intrinsic TGF brightness of approximately 1018 runaway electrons. The electric current in this nontraditional lightning process is found to be strong enough to drive nonlinear effects in the ionosphere, and in one case is comparable to the highest peak current lightning processes on the planet.
MinBD: A Minimally-Buffered Deflection Router Approaching Conventional Buffered-Router Performance

As interconnect becomes an important component of modern Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs), significant work has gone into finding the best tradeoff between performance and energy efficiency for the Network-on-Chip (NoC). Increasing core counts lead to high bandwidth demands and tight power and area constraints. One recent line of work examines bufferless deflection routing, which eliminates buffers in the NoC and instead handles contention by deflecting (misrouting) traffic. While bufferless NoC design has shown promising area and power reductions, and offers similar performance to conventional buffered designs for many workloads, such designs provide lower throughput than conventional, more complex, buffered routers at high network load. This degradation is a significant hurdle for widespread adoption of bufferless NoCs. In this work, we introduce a new minimally-buffered deflection router design, MinBD (Minimally-Buffered Deflection), that aims to obtain the performance of buffered design with nearly the area and power reductions of bufferless design. Unlike past routers that combine buffers and deflection, MinBD buffers only a fraction of the traffic that passes through it, and it decides which traffic to buffer on a fine-grained basis. We observe that a significant portion of the performance degradation in bufferless networks comes not from fundamental limits of deflection routing, but from small inefficiencies in previous bufferless designs that can be corrected: specifically, a bottleneck in ejecting traffic from the network, and inefficient deflection arbitration. The remaining performance gap can be closed by using small router buffers. Compared to previous bufferless deflection router designs, MinBD contributes (i) a router microarchitecture with a wide ejection path and improved flit arbitration relative to previous designs, and (ii) small side-buffers to hold some traffic that would have otherwise been deflected. We show that MinBD degrades performance only 4.6% from a conventional buffered network over a set of 60 network-intensive workloads in 4x4 networks, with 72.5% less network power on average, 80.0% less router area, and a competitive clock frequency.
Bird conservation would complement landslide prevention in the Central Andes of Colombia

Conservation and restoration priorities often focus on separate ecosystem problems. Inspired by the November 11th (2011) landslide event near Manizales, and the current poor results of Colombia’s Article 111 of Law 99 of 1993 as a conservation measure in this country, we set out to prioritize conservation and restoration areas where landslide prevention would complement bird conservation in the Central Andes. This area is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, but also one of the most threatened. Using the case of the Rio Blanco Reserve, near Manizales, we identified areas for conservation where endemic and small-range bird diversity was high, and where landslide risk was also high. We further prioritized restoration areas by overlapping these conservation priorities with a forest cover map. Restoring forests in bare areas of high landslide risk and important bird diversity yields benefits for both biodiversity and people. We developed a simple landslide susceptibility model using slope, forest cover, aspect, and stream proximity. Using publicly available bird range maps, refined by elevation, we mapped concentrations of endemic and small-range bird species. We identified 1.54 km2 of potential restoration areas in the Rio Blanco Reserve, and 886 km2 in the Central Andes region. By prioritizing these areas, we facilitate the application of Article 111 which requires local and regional governments to invest in land purchases for the conservation of watersheds.