Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
m-WOM in a brand's Facebook fan page

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the following variables: brand fan page dependency; parasocial interaction; attitude towards brand fan pages in enhancing users’ participation in Facebook as a mobile social network (m-WOM). ,An empirical study was carried out by means of online interviews with structured questionnaires. To analyse the data, and estimate the hypothesised relationships in the theoretical model, the partial least squares equation modelling was used. ,The results of the study indicate that accessing brands’ mobile Facebook fan pages can satisfy the needs of understanding, orientation and play. These needs, in turn, influence users’ attitude, as well as their active and passive participation. Besides, users’ active participation in brands’ fan pages is enhanced by the direct and positive influence of attitude and passive participation. ,This research enables brands to know which aspects to highlight in their communication strategies in order to increase the user’s active participation and generate m-WOM. Brands need to post information which is not only relevant, but also entertaining and visually attractive. Furthermore, they should foster the user-brand interaction to achieve users’ engagement with the brand. ,The contribution of the present research is threefold. First, it offers a new perspective in explaining eWOM participation in mobile settings based on social networks. Second, it is argued that dependency is a key driver in explaining m-WOM. Lastly, integrating parasocial integration in the authors’ model highlights the communication nature of the word-of-mouth process.
Pfinder: real-time tracking of the human body

Pfinder is a real-time system for tracking and interpretation of people. It runs on a standard SGI Indy computer, and has performed reliably on thousands of people in many different physical locations. The system uses a multi-class statistical model of color and shape to obtain a 2-D representation of head and hands in a wide range of viewing conditions. These representations are useful for applications such as wireless interfaces, video databases, and low-bandwidth coding, without cumbersome wires or attached sensors.
Validating and Dynamically Adapting and Composing Features in Concurrent Product-Lines Applications

With the pressing in-time-market towards customizedservices, software product lines (SPL) are increasinglycharacterizing most of software landscape. SPL are mainly structured through offered features, where consistent composition and dynamic variability are the driving forces. We contribute to these two challenging problems when distribution and correctness are at stake. First, we soundly specify and validate any feature-oriented requirements using a component-based Petri nets framework referred to as Co-Nets. For rapid-prototyping, we semantically interpret in true-concurrent rewriting logic. For consistently composing features, a flexible feature-algebra is proposed. Finally, for runtime adaptability and integration of features, we leverage Co-Nets with an explicit aspectual-level, where features can be dynamically (un)woven on running components. The approach is thoroughly explained using a feature-intensive multi-lift system.
Predicting Task-Specific Webpages for Revisiting

With the increased use of the web has come a corresponding increase in information overload that users face when trying to locate specific webpages, especially as a majority of visits to webpages are revisits. While automatically created browsing history lists offer a potential low-cost solution to re-locating webpages, even short browsing sessions generate a glut of webpages that do not relate to the user's information need or have no revisit value. We address how we can better support web users who want to return to information on a webpage that they have previously visited by building more useful history lists. The paper reports on a combination technique that semi-automatically segments the webpage browsing history list into tasks, applies heuristics to remove webpages that carry no intrinsic revisit value, and uses a learning model, sensitive to individual users and tasks, that predicts which webpages are likely to be revisited again. We present results from an empirical evaluation that report the likely revisit need of users and that show that adequate overall prediction accuracy can be achieved. This approach can be used to increase utility of history lists by removing information overload to users when revisiting webpages.
A scalable algorithm for radio-interferometric imaging

In recent works, sparse models and convex optimization techniques have been applied to radio-interferometric (RI) imaging showing the potential to outperform state-of-the-art imaging algorithms in the field. In this paper, we propose a scalable algorithm for RI imaging that offers a highly parallelizable structure paving the way for next- generation high-dimensional data imaging. The proposed algorithm is based on a proximal linear version of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM).
Discriminant Analysis based Feature Selection in KDD Intrusion Dataset

Intrusion detection system (IDS) plays a major role in providing network security by analyzing the network traffic log and classifying the records as attack or normal behavior. Generally, as each log record is characterized by a large set of features, an Intrusion Detection System consumes large computational power and time for the classification process. Hence, feature reduction becomes mandatory before attack classification for any IDS. Discriminant analysis is a technique which can be used for selecting important features in large set of features. In this paper, important features of KDD Cup „99 attack dataset are obtained using discriminant analysis method and used for classification of attacks. The results of discriminant analysis show that classification is done with minimum error rate with the reduced feature set. General Terms Data Mining, Intrusion Detection.
Endurance of the Soviet imperial tongue: the Russian language in contemporary Georgia

This article will examine the role of the Russian language on the periphery of the post-Soviet space by using multiple sources of data, including original matched-guise experiments, to examine the language situation in contemporary Georgia. This is one of the former Soviet republics in which the use of the titular language was most intensively institutionalized and that most ardently resisted Russification, and one that today for various reasons is most eager to escape the legacy of its Soviet past and to embed itself in the global community. In Georgia the cultural and political influence of the former imperial centre has been greatly reduced, and Russian has been challenged in functional roles by the new international lingua franca of English. The direction that the Russian language takes in a place like Georgia may be a useful bellwether for such transformations elsewhere in the post-Soviet periphery.
Adolescents' Daily Experience with Family and Friends: Contrasting Opportunity Systems.

This paper compares adolescents' experience in daily interactions with family and friends. A stratified random sample of 75 high school students provided self-reports at random times during their regular lives, including 1,236 occasions in these two primary social contexts. When with their friends, these adolescents reported a situation more conducive to enjoyment than that occurring with their families: they felt more open and free, feedback was positive, and talk was joking. However, those adolescents who spent more time with friends than with family showed poorer school performance and wider mood variability. The findings suggest that friendship interactions are experienced as positive feedback systems, having a high potential for fluid interchange but also lower homeostasis and a propensity to get out of control. In comparison, adolescents' family interactions appear more like negative feedback systems, being constrained by family maintenance requirements and goals of formal socialization.
Enhanced Unsteady Flow Visualization

In this paper, we present a high-quality texture-based enhanced approach for the visualization of unsteady vector fields. It adopts a scheme of streamline enhancement by applying a ID high-pass filter to flow textures along the orthogonal flow direction to enhance the intensity contrast among streamlines and improve the image quality of flow textures. A scheme of boundary supplement is also used to modulate the characteristic of particles flow. Using the color mapping of some scalar properties, such as magnitude, orientation and curvature, it is capable of displaying many properties of vector field which are helpful to analyze the features and topological flow patterns. It is capable of achieving a real-time rendering performance on a personal computer by using current graphics hardware.
The Unchanging American Voter

Have the American people grown more politically sophisticated in the past three decades, or do they remain relatively ignorant of the political world? Did a 'great leap forward' take place during the 1960s in which our citizenry became involved and adept voters? In this important book, Eric Smith addresses these and other provocative questions that have long befuddled political scientists and policymakers. Much of the current wisdom about American voters derives from an argument advanced in a volume entitled "The Changing American Voter", written by Nie, Verba, and Petrocik. In this work, the authors contend that the electorate made a 'great leap forward' in political sophistication and ideological thinking between the 1960 and 1964 elections. They argue that people changed in response to a shifting environment, and that, in particular, the surge of protest and ideological rhetoric between 1960 and 1964 engendered a new political savvy and sophistication. In their view, people learned to understand politics better, to relate the issues to the candidates more accurately, and to cast more informed, intelligent votes. In "The Unchanging American Voter", Smith takes issue with this portrait of an engaged American citizenry and replaces it with a quite different picture of the voters of this nation. He posits a more bleak political landscape in which the typical voter knows little about politics, is not interested in the political arena and consequently does not participate in it, and is even unable to organize his or her attitudes in a coherent manner. To support this view, Smith demonstrates how the indices by which Nie, Verba, and Petrocik measured levels of sophistication during the 1960s were methodologically flawed and how a closer examination of supposed changes reveals only superficial and unimportant shifts in the ways voters have approached the ballot box since the 1950s. "The Unchanging American Voter" is an intelligent and original work that provides a new perspective of the American citizenry. It is sure to engender discussion and debate about the dynamics of voting in postwar America.
Classifier Combination Based Source Identification for Cell Phone Images

Rapid popularization of smart cell phone equipped with camera has led to a number of new legal and criminal problems related to multimedia such as digital image, which makes cell phone source identification an important branch of digital image forensics. This paper proposes a classifier combination based source identification strategy for cell phone images. To identify the outlier cell phone models of the training sets in multi-class classifier, a one-class classifier is orderly used in the framework. Feature vectors including color filter array (CFA) interpolation coefficients estimation and multi-feature fusion is employed to verify the effectiveness of the classifier combination strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that for different feature sets, our method presents high accuracy of source identification both for the cell phone in the training sets and the outliers.
WRF AND MM 5 REALTIME SYSTEM STATISTICAL COMPARISONS USING THE MODEL EVALUATION TOOLKIT ( MET )

Objective verification of numerical weather predictions (NWP) against observations is critical for understanding model-simulated atmospheric processes and assessing forecast skill. To facilitate convenient evaluations the WRF Development Testbed Center (DTC) has developed the Model Evaluation Toolkit (MET). In this study MET is used to compare the statistical accuracy of realtime predictions using the advanced research version of the Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF-ARW) and the Pennsylvania State University / National Center for Atmospheric Research (PSU/NCAR) mesoscale model (MM5). In this preliminary MET application both models are verified on all domains using standard meteorological statistics at the surface and at mandatory pressure levels aloft. The overall goal of the project is to validate WRF as an eventual replacement for MM5 in fielded rapidly-relocatable forecast systems developed by Penn State for battlefield and defense applications (Stauffer et al. 2007).
Time-space trade-off lower bounds for randomized computation of decision problems

We prove the first time-space lower bound trade-offs for randomized computation of decision problems. The bounds hold even in the case that the computation is allowed to have arbitrary probability of error on a small fraction of inputs. Our techniques are extension of those used by Ajtai and by Beame, Jayram, and Saks that applied to deterministic branching programs. Our results also give a quantitative improvement over the previous results.Previous time-space trade-off results for decision problems can be divided naturally into results for functions with <i>Boolean domain</i>, that is, each input variable is {0,1}-valued, and the case of <i>large domain</i>, where each input variable takes on values from a set whose size grows with the number of variables.In the case of Boolean domain, Ajtai exhibited an explicit class of functions, and proved that any deterministic Boolean branching program or RAM using space <i>S</i> = <i>o</i>(<i>n</i>) requires superlinear time <i>T</i> to compute them. The functional form of the superlinear bound is not given in his paper, but optimizing the parameters in his arguments gives <i>T</i> = Ω(<i>n</i> log log <i>n</i>/log log log <i>n</i>) for <i>S</i> = <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>1−&epsis;</sup>). For the same functions considered by Ajtai, we prove a time-space trade-off (for randomized branching programs with error) of the form <i>T</i> = Ω(<i>n</i> &sqrt; log(<i>n/S</i>)/log log (<i>n/S</i>)). In particular, for space <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>1−&epsis;</sup>), this improves the lower bound on time to Ω(<i>n</i>&sqrt; log <i>n</i>/log log <i>n</i>). In the large domain case, we prove lower bounds of the form <i>T</i> = Ω(<i>n</i>&sqrt; log(<i>n/S</i>)/log log (<i>n/S</i>)) for randomized computation of the element distinctness function and lower bounds of the form <i>T</i> = Ω(<i>n</i> log (<i>n/S</i>)) for randomized computation of Ajtai's Hamming closeness problem and of certain functions associated with quadratic forms over large fields.
A Survey of Enterprise Middlebox Deployments

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Mediaboard: a shared whiteboard application for the mbone

In this thesis, we describe our comprehensive design and imp lementation of a multicast based shared drawing tool called MediaBoard. Like its prede c ssor, the LBL whiteboard application, wb, its design follows the principles of applica tion level framing and lightweight sessions. Both applications use the Scalable, Reliable Mul ticast protocol (SRM) to distribute data over the network. But unlike wb, which embeds the networ king code in the application, MediaBoard uses a separate SRM framework library and custom izes it to achieve application level semantics and thus performance gains. Based on actual deployment experiences — MediaBoard was used in an “online classroom” at U.C. Berkeley — we extended the design to improve its usability, provide increased awareness of remo t participants, and integrate support for interactive browsing of the drawing space history. The a pplication is also extremely flexible. The user-interface is specified in a object-oriented script ing language that can easily be modified and in addition extensions can be added easily to incorpo rate new functionalities. We have completed a working version of the application that runs on a variety of platforms and has been used in many real situations. We also describe our implement atio experiences and informal evaluations of the tool including the results of an informal user study.
ret2dir: Rethinking Kernel Isolation

Return-to-user (ret2usr) attacks redirect corrupted kernel pointers to data residing in user space. In response, several kernel-hardening approaches have been proposed to enforce a more strict address space separation, by preventing arbitrary control flow transfers and dereferences from kernel to user space. Intel and ARM also recently introduced hardware support for this purpose in the form of the SMEP, SMAP, and PXN processor features. Unfortunately, although mechanisms like the above prevent the explicit sharing of the virtual address space among user processes and the kernel, conditions of implicit sharing still exist due to fundamental design choices that trade stronger isolation for performance. In this work, we demonstrate how implicit page frame sharing can be leveraged for the complete circumvention of software and hardware kernel isolation protections. We introduce a new kernel exploitation technique, called return-to-direct-mapped memory (ret2dir), which bypasses all existing ret2usr defenses, namely SMEP, SMAP, PXN, KERNEXEC, UDEREF, and kGuard. We also discuss techniques for constructing reliable ret2dir exploits against x86, x86-64, AArch32, and AArch64 Linux targets. Finally, to defend against ret2dir attacks, we present the design and implementation of an exclusive page frame ownership scheme for the Linux kernel that prevents the implicit sharing of physical memory pages with minimal runtime overhead.
Aramid nanofiber-reinforced transparent nanocomposites

Nanoscale polymeric fibers are expected to bring about exceptional mechanical and optical properties in composite materials related to the better integration of different properties between fibers and polymers. The discovery of the first aramid nanofiber dispersion from commercial para-aramid macrofibers similar to Kevlar® developed by DuPont allowed the emergence of an innovative nanoscale building block with great potential for engineering novel high-performance polymer nanocomposites. Here we report the fabrication of aramid nanofiber-reinforced polyacrylic-acid thin films using vacuum-assisted flocculation. We show that the resulting composite has high transparency owing to the nanoscale size of the fibers. The multiple hydrogen bonds available at the interface between the polyacrylic acid and nanofibers result in significant improvement of mechanical properties, with Young's modulus outperforming single-walled carbon nanotube composites. The successful use of ANFs in producing transparent, strong and flexible polymer nanocomposites indicates their great potential as an effective reinforcing agent in optical applications.
Interactions between two parasites of brown trout (Salmo trutta): Consequences of preinfection

Abstract Preinfection by one parasitic species may facilitate or by contrast hamper the subsequent penetration and/or establishment of other parasites in a host. The biology of interacting species, timing of preinfection, and dosage of subsequent parasite exposure are likely important variables in this multiparasite dynamic infection process. The increased vulnerability to subsequent infection can be an important and often overlooked factor influencing parasite virulence. We investigated how the preinfection by freshwater pearl mussel Margaritifera margaritifera glochidia could influence the success of subsequent infection by the common trematode Diplostomum pseudospathaceum in brown trout Salmo trutta and vice versa whether preinfection by the trematode made fish more susceptible to glochidia infection. The first experiment was repeated twice with different (low and high) exposure doses to initiate the subsequent trematode infection, while in the second experiment we varied the timing of the preinfection with trematodes. The preinfection with glochidia made fish more vulnerable to subsequent infection with trematodes. Since the trematodes penetrate through the gills, we suggest that increased host vulnerability was most likely the result of increased respiration caused by the freshwater pearl mussel glochidia encysted on gills. In turn, brown trout preinfected with trematodes were more vulnerable to the subsequent glochidial infection, but only if they were preinfected shortly before the subsequent infection (20 hr). Fish preinfected with trematodes earlier (2 weeks before the subsequent infection) did not differ in their vulnerability to glochidia. These effects were observed at moderate intensities of infections similar to those that occur in nature. Our study demonstrates how the timing and sequence of exposure to parasitic species can influence infection success in a host–multiparasite system. It indicates that the negative influence of glochidia on host fitness is likely to be underestimated and that this should be taken into consideration when organizing freshwater pearl mussel restoration procedures.
The directory-based cache coherence protocol for the DASH multiprocessor

DASH is a scalable shared-memory multiprocessor whose architecture consists of powerful processing nodes, each with a portion of the shared-memory, connected to a scalable interconnection network. A key feature of DASH is its distributed direction-based cache coherence protocol. Unlike traditional snoopy coherence protocols, the DASH protocol does not rely on broadcast; instead it uses point-to-point messages sent between the processors and memories to keep caches consistent. Furthermore, the DASH system does not contain any single serialization or control point. While these features provide the basis for scalability, they also force a reevaluation of many fundamental issues involved in the design of a protocol. These include the issues of correctness, performance, and protocol complexity. The design of the DASH coherence protocol is presented and discussed from the viewpoint of how it addresses the above issues. Also discussed is a strategy for verifying the correctness of the protocol. A brief comparison of the protocol with the IEEE Scalable Coherent Interface protocol is made. <<ETX>>
Draft Genome Sequence of Alcanivorax sp. Strain KX64203 Isolated from Deep-Sea Sediments of Iheya North, Okinawa Trough

ABSTRACT This report describes the draft genome sequence of Alcanivorax sp. strain KX64203, isolated from deep-sea sediment samples. The reads generated by an Ion Torrent PGM were assembled into contigs, with a total size of 4.76 Mb. The data will improve our understanding of the strain's function in alkane degradation.