Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
xLED: Covert Data Exfiltration from Air-Gapped Networks via Router LEDs

In this paper we show how attackers can covertly leak data (e.g., encryption keys, passwords and files) from highly secure or air-gapped networks via the row of status LEDs that exists in networking equipment such as LAN switches and routers. Although it is known that some network equipment emanates optical signals correlated with the information being processed by the device ('side-channel'), intentionally controlling the status LEDs to carry any type of data ('covert-channel') has never studied before. A malicious code is executed on the LAN switch or router, allowing full control of the status LEDs. Sensitive data can be encoded and modulated over the blinking of the LEDs. The generated signals can then be recorded by various types of remote cameras and optical sensors. We provide the technical background on the internal architecture of switches and routers (at both the hardware and software level) which enables this type of attack. We also present amplitude and frequency based modulation and encoding schemas, along with a simple transmission protocol. We implement a prototype of an exfiltration malware and discuss its design and implementation. We evaluate this method with a few routers and different types of LEDs. In addition, we tested various receivers including remote cameras, security cameras, smartphone cameras, and optical sensors, and also discuss different detection and prevention countermeasures. Our experiment shows that sensitive data can be covertly leaked via the status LEDs of switches and routers at a bit rates of 10 bit/sec to more than 1Kbit/sec per LED.
Developmental Commentary: Individual and Contextual Influences on Student–Teacher Relationships and Children's Early Problem Behaviors

Understanding factors associated with children's early behavioral difficulties is of vital importance to children's school success, and to the prevention of future behavior problems. Although biological factors can influence the expression of certain behaviors, the probability of children exhibiting classroom behavior problems is intensified when they are exposed to multiple risk factors, particularly negative student–teacher interactions. Children who exhibit behavior problems during early childhood and the transition to kindergarten, without intervention, can be placed on a developmental trajectory for serious behavior problems in later grades. Using a developmental systems model, this commentary provides a conceptual framework for understanding the contributions of individual and contextual factors to the development of early student–teacher relationships. Parent, teacher, and student characteristics are discussed as they are related to shaping student–teacher interactions and children's adjustment to school.
Interactive Spaces Natural interfaces supporting gestures and manipulations in interactive spaces

This doctoral dissertation focuses on the development of interactive spaces through the use of natural interfaces based on gestures and manipulative actions. In the real world people use their senses to perceive the external environment and they use manipulations and gestures to explore the world around them, communicate and interact with other individuals. From this perspective the use of natural interfaces that exploit the human sensorial and explorative abilities helps filling the gap between physical and digital world. In the first part of this thesis we describe the work made for improving interfaces and devices for tangible, multi touch and free hand interactions. The idea is to design devices able to work also in uncontrolled environments, and in situations where control is mostly of the physical type where even the less experienced users can express their manipulative exploration and gesture communication abilities. We also analyze how it can be possible to mix these techniques to create an interactive space, specifically designed for teamwork where the natural interfaces are distributed in order to encourage collaboration. We then give some examples of how these interactive scenarios can host various types of applications facilitating, for instance, the exploration of 3D models, the enjoyment of multimedia contents and social interaction. Finally we discuss our results and put them in a wider context, focusing our attention particularly on how the proposed interfaces actually improve people’s lives and activities and the interactive spaces become a place of aggregation where we can pursue objectives that are both personal and shared with others.
Term weighting using contextual information for categorization of unstructured text documents

During categorization of text documents, term weighting assigns appropriate weights to different terms. All the terms having equal weights have different contribution in deciding context of the document. This paper proposes a novel concept of associating positional context among regions for term weighting. For this, Dynamic Partitioning of text documents with First and Last Partitions (DynaPart-FiLa) is proposed. Experiments show that associating positional context improves F-measure by 11.9% for Reuters-21578, 23.6% for talk. * Newsgroups and 34.82% for Reuters Corpus Volume I (RCV1) in comparison to traditional term weighting scheme. The performance improvement is at the expense of small additional storage cost.
Mycotic keratitis; 5 cases caused by unusual fungi.

Five cases of mycotic keratitis due to fungi not previously shown to cause this condition (Cylindrocarpon tonkinensis, Botryodiplodia theobromae and Phialophora gougerotii) are reported. The diagnosis was based on the demonstration of fungal elements from the eye lesion and culture of the organism. Data concerning trauma, occupation and type of lesion are discussed in the text.
Urinary 8-oxo-7,8-dihydro-2′-deoxyguanosine (8-oxo-dG), a reliable oxidative stress marker in hypertension

The potential use of oxidative stress products as disease markers and progression is an important aspect of biomedical research. In the present study, the quantification of urine 8-oxo-7,8-dihydro-2′-deoxyguanosine (8-oxo-dG) concentration has been used to express the oxidation status of hypertensive subjects. 8-oxo-dG has been simultaneously isolated and assayed in nuclear (nDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). In addition, oxidative stress of mononuclear cells has been estimated by means of GSH and GSSG levels and GSSG/GSH ratio in hypertensive subjects before and after antihypertensive treatment. It is shown that oxidative stress decreases significantly in hypertensive patients after treatment the effect being accompanied by reduction of their blood pressure. A significant correlation is observed comparing the yield of urine 8-oxo-dG and that isolated from mitochondria DNA. Moreover, urinary excretion of 8-oxo-dG also correlates with the GSSG/GSH ratio of cells. Conclusion: urine 8-oxo-dG assay is a good marker for monitoring oxidative stress changes in hypertensives.
Effects of Dietary Consumption of Garlic on Delaying Cataract Induced by Sodium Selenite in Rats 1

Commercial garlic is widely used for certain therapeutic purposes, including cardiovascular disorders, anti-microbial, anti-cancer, and treatment of hyperglycemia. Garlic posses a strong antioxidant protective effect by its ability to scavenge free radicals. Several studies reported the correction of serum lipid profile in response to consumption of garlic powder, thus assumed to have a protective effect against atherosclerosis. The present study aims to investigate the role of dietary consumption of garlic on delaying or protecting from cataract formation. Materials and Methods: Twenty seven Wister rat pups were divided into four groups. Group one (n=6) received basal diet and served as control. The rats in group 2 (n=8) were injected subcutaneously with sodium selenite (30μmol/kg body weight) to induce cataract and fed on basal diet. Group 3 (n=6) were given 5% garlic powder added to their basal diet. Group 4 selenite-induced cataract (n=7) also administered 5% garlic powder in their basal diet. Development of cataract was assessed one week later, and its density was graded by slit lamp biomicroscopy. Total phenolic compounds of garlic were determined. After the end of experiment (two months), all rats were fasted overnight. Blood samples were collected from the eye vein and then the crystalline lenses were excised. All planned samples were prepared as will be described. The levels of serum lipid profiles were determined. The antioxidants and oxidative stress parameters such as superoxide dismutase, catalase, reduced glutathione, total antioxidant capacity, malondialdehyde and nitric oxide were assessed. Fas ligand (FAS-L) as apoptotic marker was also assessed in the blood and lens. The crystalline lens protein patterns on sodium dodocyle sulphatepolyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) were identified and analyzed by computerized program. Results: All control rat lenses were clear. Development of cataract was reduced by 85.7% in the group supplemented with 5% garlic. Selenite induced cataract group developed bilateral complete opacification. The consumption of 5% garlic in cataractous group led to significant decrease in serum total lipids (15.5%), total cholesterol (TC) 10.3%, triacylglycerol (TAG) 26.7%, and low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) 19.5%. There was a significant increase in the level of serum high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) 18.0% when compared to selenite-induced cataract group. Also significant decrease in the activities of catalase, superoxide dismutase, reduced glutathione and total antioxidants. A significant increase in the levels of malondialdehyde, nitric oxide and Fas-L were noticed in cataractous group when compared to control group. The levels of all previous parameters were improved after treatment with 5% garlic. Conclusion: Our findings indicate that garlic inhibits selenite-induced cataract formation by inhibiting lipid peroxidation, oxidative stress and act as anti-apoptotic agent that can delay progress of cataract formation.
Improving the dependability of AMR sensors used in automotive applications

Electronic systems are replacing mechanical parts to improve the safety and performance of the cars. However, the electronic components should be dependable, meaning they should be trusted to work properly over time. AMR sensors are widely used in automotive for angle measurements. Nevertheless, they are affected by performance degradation and catastrophic faults. Both should be handled to guarantee the correct operation of the sensor over time. This paper proposed two modules, fault-tolerant, and self-calibration. Results show they allow to improve the dependability of the sensor.
Simulated Electrification of a Small Thunderstorm with Two-Moment Bulk Microphysics

Abstract Electrification and lightning are simulated for a small continental multicell storm. The results are consistent with observations and thus provide additional understanding of the charging processes and evolution of this storm. The first six observed lightning flashes were all negative cloud-to-ground (CG) flashes, after which intracloud (IC) flashes also occurred between middle and upper levels of the storm. The model simulation reproduces the basic evolution of lightning from low and middle levels to upper levels. The observed lightning indicated an initial charge structure of at least an inverted dipole (negative charge above positive). The simulations show that noninductive charge separation higher in the storm can enhance the main negative charge sufficiently to produce negative CG flashes before upper-level IC flashes commence. The result is a “bottom-heavy” tripole charge structure with midlevel negative charge and a lower positive charge region that is more significant than the upper posit.
Small Enterprise Association of Australia and New Zealand 26 th Annual SEAANZ Conference Proceedings 11-12 Sydney 2013 Entrepreneurial Orientation and Leadership : A Review , Model and Research Agenda

Although the extant literature indicates that both entrepreneurial orientation and transformational leadership influence firm performance, there is limited literature examining how these two important organisational variables relate to each other, and how they interact to influence firm performance within the context of small businesses. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review the extant literature on entrepreneurial orientation, transformational leadership and firm performance and then build a logical framework depicting the interrelationships between transformational leadership, entrepreneurial orientation and organisational effectiveness within the context of small businesses. Specifically, the paper advances a conceptual research framework which explicates some pathways through which leader behaviours influence the firm entrepreneurial orientation and overall firm effectiveness. Finally, the paper outlines a future research agenda for effectively leading entrepreneurial organisations within the small business sector.
A Self-Powered and Optimal SSHI Circuit Integrated With an Active Rectifier for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

This paper presents a piezoelectric energy harvesting circuit, which integrates a Synchronized Switch Harvesting on Inductor (SSHI) circuit and an active rectifier. The major design challenge of the SSHI method is flipping the capacitor voltage at optimal times. The proposed SSHI circuit inserts an active diode on each resonant loop, which ensures flipping of the capacitor voltage at optimal times and eliminates the need to tune the switching time. The diodes of the SSHI circuit are also used as a rectifier to further simplify the controller. The key advantage of the proposed circuit is a simple controller, which leads to low power dissipation of the proposed circuit to result in high efficiency. The proposed circuit is self-powered and capable of starting even when the battery is completely drained. The circuit was fabricated in BiCMOS <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.25~\mu \text {m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> technology with a die size of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.98 \times 0.76$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm<sup>2</sup>. Measured results indicate that the proposed circuit increases the amount of power harvested from a piezoelectric cantilever by 2.1 times when compared with a full bridge (FB) rectifier and achieves a power conversion efficiency of 85%. The proposed circuit dissipates about <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$24~\mu \text {W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> while the controller alone only <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.5~\mu \text {W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>.
Ranging in UWB using commercial radio modules: Experimental validation and NLOS mitigation

Ultra wide band (UWB) wireless transmission has received notable and considerable attention in the field of next generation location-aware wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This trend is due to the large bandwidth of UWB signals contributing many advantages for positioning, communication, and radar applications: penetration through obstacles, accurate position estimation, high-speed data transmission, and a low-cost, low power transceiver. Commercially available UWB radio modules were evaluated. Such modules have the ability to very precisely measure time of arrival of RF signals, range, or localization. The physical layers specify the received signal strength indicator utilized in the localization technique. We estimated and compared the distance of a walking human with the reference distance in different environments, indoor LOS and hard-NLOS utilizing one of these commercial modules. This report also introduces the identification and mitigation of NLOS channels. The results were highly acceptable for indoor localization because the module attained ranging accuracy in a hard-NLOS environment below one meter.
Efficient Secondary Attribute Lookup in Key-Value Stores

NoSQL databases like key-value stores achieve fast write throughput and fast lookups on the primary key. However, many applications also require queries on non-primary attributes. For that, several NoSQL databases have added support for secondary indexes. To our best knowledge, little work has studied how to support secondary indexing on pure key-value stores, which are a fundamental and popular category within the NoSQL databases range. We propose a novel lightweight secondary indexing technique on log-structure merge-tree (LSM tree)-based key-value stores, which we refer as “embedded index”. The embedded index, which utilizes Bloom filters, is very space-efficient, and achieves very high writethroughput rates, comparable to non-indexed key-value stores. It is embedded inside the data files, that is, no separate index table is maintained. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to use Bloom filters for secondary indexing. The embedded index also simplifies the transaction management, compared to alternative stand-alone secondary indexing schemes. For the cases when range query on secondary attributes in embedded index is required, we also propose to apply a modified version of interval tree to keep track of the attribute value range in each data block to support that. As a second contribution, we have defined and implemented two “stand-alone indexing” techniques (i.e. separate data structures maintained for secondary indexes) on key-value stores that borrow ideas from the secondary indexing strategies used in column-based NoSQL and traditional relational (SQL) databases. We implemented all indexing schemes on Google’s popular opensource LevelDB key-value store. Our comprehensive experimental and theoretical evaluation reveals interesting trade-offs between the indexing strategies in terms of read and write throughputs. A key result is that the embedded index is superior for high writethroughput requirements. We created and published a realistic Twitterstyle read/write workload generator to facilitate our experiments. We also published our index implementations on LevelDB as open source.
Rapid and advanced tools for mycotoxin analysis: a review

The problems associated with mycotoxin contamination of foods and feeds are well established and, in many cases, have been known for a long time. Consequently, the techniques for detecting known mycotoxins are quite advanced and range from methods for directly detecting the toxins themselves, based upon physical characteristics of the toxins, to methods for indirectly detecting the toxins, such as immunoassays. This review focuses on recent technologies that can be used to detect mycotoxins and, as such, is not a comprehensive review of the mycotoxin analytical literature. Rather, the intent is to survey the range of technologies from those that are instrument intensive such as modern chromatographic methods to those that require no instrumentation, such as certain immunoassays and biosensors. In particular, mass spectrometric techniques using ambient ionization offer the intriguing possibility of non-destructive sampling and detection. The potential application of one such technique, desorption electrospray ionization (DESI), is demonstrated for fumonisin B1 on maize. While methods for detecting mycotoxins are quite advanced, the need remains for assays with increased throughput, for the exploration of novel detection technologies, and for the comprehensive validation of such technologies as they continue to be developed.
Approximation of 2d˟2d Matrices Using Tensor Decomposition

A new method for structured representation of matrices and vectors is presented. The method is based on the representation of a matrix as a $d$-dimensional tensor and applying the TT-decomposition proposed recently. It turned out that for many important cases the number of parameters to represent an $n\times n$ matrix falls down to $\mathcal{O}(\log^{\alpha}n)$, giving a logarithmic storage. It is shown that this format can be used not only for storage reduction, but also for linear algebra operations. Possible applications include differential and integral equations, and data and image compression.
Strategies for Gene Mapping in Inherited Ophthalmic Diseases

AbstractGene mapping of inherited ophthalmic diseases such as congenital cataracts, retinal degeneration, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, myopia, optic atrophy, and eye malformations has shed more light on the disease pathology, identified targets for research on therapeutics, earlier detection, and treatment options for disease management and patient care. This article details the different approaches to gene identification for both Mendelian and complex eye disorders.
Sophisticated Bidders in Beauty-Contest Auctions

We study bidding behavior by firms in beauty-contest auctions, i.e., auctions in which the winning bid is the one that gets closest to some function (average) of all submitted bids. Using a dataset on public procurement beauty-contest auctions, we show that firms’ observed bidding behavior departs from equilibrium and can be predicted by a “sophistication” index, which captures the firms’ capacity of bidding close to optimality in the past. We show that our empirical evidence is consistent with a Cognitive Hierarchy model of bidders’ behavior. We also investigate whether and how firms learn to bid strategically through experience. (JEL D22, D44, D83, H57, L12)
Constructing a class hierarchy with properties by refining and aligning Japanese wikipedia ontology and Japanese WordNet

Introduction We have proposed learning methods for building a large-scale and high accuracy general ontology called Japanese Wikipedia Ontology (JWO) by extracting the concepts and relationships between concepts from various semistructured resources in Japanese Wikipedia [3]. However, JWO has problems because it lacks upper classes and appropriate definitions of properties. Thus, the aim of our research was to complement the upper classes in JWO by aligning JWO and Japanese WordNet (JWN) 3 using ontology alignment(OA) techniques. To achieve our aim, we developed tools that help users to refine classinstance relationships, to identify the JWO classes that need to be aligned with JWN synsets, and to align the JWO classes with the JWN synsets via user interaction. We also integrated JWO and JWN by using a domain ontology development environment, DODDLE-OWL [1]. Moreover, we propose a method for building a class hierarchy with defined properties by elevating common properties defined in sibling classes to higher classes in JWO. This research is based on our previous study [2]. The refined JWO and source code of the developed tools can be downloaded via a GitHub repository .
Overview of LVRT-capability pre-evaluation with an inverter based test bench

With increased renewable power penetration level the system operators of power grids require low-voltage ride-through (LVRT) capability of renewable power plants. The LVRT-capability has to be verified during the process of certification with precisely defined short circuit tests on a reactance based test bench. For the development of the fault ride through (FRT) capability the cost intensive reactance based test configuration is replaced by an inverter based voltage sag generator (VSG). This paper deals with an overview of the whole inverter based test configuration including the control structure of the grid emulator and the adjustment of the grid side converter's control structure to reach LVRT-capability as well as measurement results for the pre-evaluation.