Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
S3 System: A System for Sharing Social Sensor Data and Analytical Programs

Recently, various SNSs (social networking services) such as Twitter1, Facebook2, and so on, have gained wide use. These enable access to a wide rage of information related to the real world, through analysis of texts posted on such SNSs. For example, when many people tweet about an earthquake, we can typically infer that an earthquake has occurred in the real world. In this study, we consider the acquisition of such information as social sensor usage, and call the generated data social sensor data. We can exploit social sensor data for many applications, and easily reuse the data by sharing analytical programs to develop new types of social sensors. However, there currently exists no suitable system for sharing them. In this study, we designed and implemented a system to generate and share such social sensor data, called the S3 (S-cube, social sensor sharing) system; then compared the features of the S3 system with those of other data- and analytical program-sharing systems, and assessed the relative effectiveness of the S3 system in sharing social sensor data.
Data-plane Defenses against Routing Attacks on Tor

Abstract Tor is susceptible to traffic correlation attacks in which an adversary who observes flows entering and leaving the anonymity network can apply statistical techniques to correlate flows and de-anonymize their endpoints. While an adversary may not be naturally positioned to conduct such attacks, a recent study shows that the Internet’s control-plane can be manipulated to increase an adversary’s view of the network, and consequently, improve its ability to perform traffic correlation. This paper explores, in-depth, the effects of control-plane attacks on the security of the Tor network. Using accurate models of the live Tor network, we quantify Tor’s susceptibility to these attacks by measuring the fraction of the Tor network that is vulnerable and the advantage to the adversary of performing the attacks. We further propose defense mechanisms that protect Tor users from manipulations at the control-plane. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that by leveraging existing trust anchors in Tor, defenses deployed only in the data-plane are sufficient to detect most control-plane attacks. Our defenses do not assume the active participation of Internet Service Providers, and require only very small changes to Tor. We show that our defenses result in a more than tenfold decrease in the effectiveness of certain control-plane attacks.
Staged configuration through specialization and multilevel configuration of feature models

Feature modeling is a key technique for capturing commonalities and variabilities in system families and product lines. In this article, we propose a cardinality-based notation for feature modeling, which integrates a number of existing extensions of previous approaches. We then introduce and motivate the novel concept of staged configuration. Staged configuration can be achieved by the stepwise specialization of feature models or by multilevel configuration, where the configuration choices available in each stage are defined by separate feature models. Staged configuration is important because, in a realistic development process, different groups and different people make product configuration choices in different stages. Finally, we also discuss how multilevel configuration avoids a breakdown between the different abstraction levels of individual features. This problem, sometimes referred to as 'analysis paralysis', easily occurs in feature modeling because features can denote entities at arbitrary levels of abstraction within a system family. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Neuraminidase and Hemagglutinin Matching Patterns of a Highly Pathogenic Avian and Two Pandemic H1N1 Influenza A Viruses

Background Influenza A virus displays strong reassortment characteristics, which enable it to achieve adaptation in human infection. Surveying the reassortment and virulence of novel viruses is important in the prevention and control of an influenza pandemic. Meanwhile, studying the mechanism of reassortment may accelerate the development of anti-influenza strategies. Methodology/Principal Findings The hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) matching patterns of two pandemic H1N1 viruses (the 1918 and current 2009 strains) and a highly pathogenic avian influenza A virus (H5N1) were studied using a pseudotyped particle (pp) system. Our data showed that four of the six chimeric HA/NA combinations could produce infectious pps, and that some of the chimeric pps had greater infectivity than did their ancestors, raising the possibility of reassortment among these viruses. The NA of H5N1 (A/Anhui/1/2005) could hardly reassort with the HAs of the two H1N1 viruses. Many biological characteristics of HA and NA, including infectivity, hemagglutinating ability, and NA activity, are dependent on their matching pattern. Conclusions/Significance Our data suggest the existence of an interaction between HA and NA, and the HA NA matching pattern is critical for valid viral reassortment.
Growth of mammalian cells at high oxygen concentrations.

Oxygen, although essential to the growth of mammalian cells in vitro and in vivo, has been widely reported to be toxic at concentrations at or above the oxygen concentration in culture medium equilibrated with air (approximately 200 microM). We were therefore surprised to note that a diploid human B-cell line (TK6) was able to proliferate normally while exposed to 380 microM-oxygen. This observation was extended to Vero (African Green monkey kidney) cells, and Sp2/0-derived murine transfectomas producing antibody. Using an experimental system with a high capacity for oxygen transfer, we determined the growth rates of the three cell lines at controlled oxygen concentrations ranging from 80 microM to 910 microM. Each of these cell types was able to grow normally at oxygen concentrations up to 360-380 microM. At oxygen concentrations above 380 microM, a significant increase in the apparent doubling times of the cells was observed. No adverse effect of oxygen on TK6 cell survival was seen for concentrations ranging from 60 microM to 410 microM. We conclude that exponential growth at nearly maximum growth rates was observed for Sp2/0-derived cells, TK6, and Vero cells at constant oxygen concentrations up to 400 microM (twice air saturation). These findings have substantial implications for process control in the production of cells and cell-derived materials. The intrinsic oxygen transfer rate of any cell culture vessel can be increased severalfold by raising the oxygen gas concentration. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Does Psychological Well-Being Change with Age?

We contrast cross-sectional age differences in the six dimensions of Ryff’s scales of psychological well-being (RPWB) in several large surveys (MIDUS, NSFH, and WLS) with intracohort changes observed across more than a decade in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS). The six dimensions of eudaimonic well-being identified by Ryff are personal growth, purpose in life, positive relations with others, self-acceptance, autonomy, and environmental mastery. Our findings reveal that of the six RPWB dimensions, personal growth and purpose in life exhibit similar cross-sectional variation across age groups only in NSFH. Otherwise, crosssectional age variations in RPWB sub-dimensions are minor, accounting for less than one percent of the variance in the indexes of well-being. Temporal variations estimated in the WLS graduate sample are miniscule, though statistically significant. They account for far less than one percent of the variance in each index of well-being. Because the scope of longitudinal age trajectories in RPWB scales is so narrow, those trajectories have no clear implications for the multidimensionality of RPWB. Indeed, heterogeneity among individual scale items should be taken into account in assessing variation in well-being by age and time because scales comprising different items yield different cross-sectional and longitudinal age patterns. Does Psychological Well-Being Change with Age? Many theorists today see personality in terms of flexible adaptation over the life course (Moody 2000) and suggest that people bring positive resources to aging, such as a feeling of selfworth, a personal sense of meaning, or a belief in the controllability of the environment. Psychological well-being is viewed as a fundamental aspect of positive aging and an indispensable component of life-span development and adaptability (Ryff 1989a,b). Using three large surveys, this study examines cross-sectional and longitudinal age differences in the six dimensions of Ryff’s scales of psychological well-being (RPWB). Our analysis is complementary to an earlier work of Springer and Hauser (2005), which showed that four of the six PWB dimensions were virtually indistinguishable after correction for measurement error. Assessing the age-related similarities and differences in the dimensions of PWB can contribute to the debate about the structure of Ryff’s scales and the interrelationship among its components (Ryff and Keyes 1995; Kafka and Kozma 2002; Springer and Hauser 2005a,b, Ryff and Singer 2005). First, we review findings from extant cross-sectional studies documenting age differences in the dimensions of RPWB. Then, we present the results of our analysis contrasting crosssectional age variation in three major surveys – the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), and Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) – with true intracohort changes observed across more than a decade in the WLS. Finally, we discuss methodological implications of our findings for the structure of RPWB subscales.
Recombinant GST‐human osteopontin fusion protein is functional in RGD‐dependent cell adhesion

Osteopontin (OPN) is a secreted phosphoprotein expressed by many tumor cells, as well as a limited set of normal cells. Native OPN has been shown to support cell adhesion in an RGD‐peptide‐inhibitable fashion. Here we expressed human OPN in E. coli as a recombinant fusion protein with glutathione‐S‐transferase (GST). We report that the GST‐OPN fusion protein has functional activity. PAP2 (ras‐transformed, metastatic murine NIH 3T3) and MDA‐MB‐435 human mammary carcinoma cells bound to GST‐OPN in an in vitro cell adhesion assay nearly as well as to native bovine OPN. Adhesion to the recombinant fusion protein was blocked by addition of GRGDS peptide, suggesting that the cells adhere to the recombinant and native OPN proteins by similar, integrin‐mediated mechanisms. Adhesion to both sources of OPN also was inhibited by thrombin treatment of the protein. Thrombin cleaves GST from OPN in the fusion protein, and also cleaves internally in OPN, adjacent to the RGD sequence of the protein. Our results suggest that (a) thrombin cleavage of native OPN may be a natural regulator of OPN function, and (b) the majority of OPN cell binding activity is mediated by the RGD sequence in the protein backbone, with little or no requirement for post‐translational modifications that occur in native OPN for adhesive function as measured here.
Towards a Distributed Continuous Certification Process

Software scale and complexity are growing by every measure: more hardware and software, more communication links, more interdependency, more lines of code, more storage and data, etc. At the same time business trends are increasingly squeezing development resources. In particular, development processes are straining under severe cost and time-to-market pressures. Global competition and market deregulation are shrinking profit margins and thus limiting budgets for the development and QA of software. In response to these trends, developers have begun to change the way they build and validate software systems by (among other things) moving towards more flexible product designs allowing dynamic reconfiguration. This approach promises to improve cost, quality, and development-time, but creates other problems, especially when used in the context of safety-critical systems. To realize this promise, however, effective certification becomes more important than ever since as static controls are removed or reduced, it becomes even more vital that (1) problems be caught as quickly as possible and (2) systems not be allowed to drift so far from their intended functional and performance requirements that rework costs overwhelm the hoped-for efficiencies. This article can present and discuss some of our recent efforts to address these problems.
The formation of trust and distrust in recommendation agents in repeated interactions: a process-tracing analysis

Recommendation agents (RAs) help customers to cope with information complexity and information overload in electronic commerce (ecommerce). This paper addresses the changes of trust/distrust structures (cognitive vs. emotional components) and trust/distrust formation processes from the initial interaction between customers and an RA to the subsequent repeated interactions. This paper contributes theoretically by proposing two conceptual models to analyze trust/distrust formation processes. It contributes empirically by revealing that the numbers of processes generating cognitive and emotional trust/distrust drop significantly from the initial interaction to the second interaction, the numbers then stabilize. In contrast, the percentage distribution of these processes remains the same during repeated interactions. The same rule holds for trust/distrust formation processes. These results explain why the initial interaction is the critical time for trust/distrust formation. This study calls for future research on RA design aiming at trust building and distrust prevention for customers experiencing RAs for the first time.
Adaptive quasiconformal kernel nearest neighbor classification

Nearest neighbor classification assumes locally constant class conditional probabilities. This assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions due to the curse-of-dimensionality. Severe bias can be introduced under these conditions when using the nearest neighbor rule. We propose an adaptive nearest neighbor classification method to try to minimize bias. We use quasiconformal transformed kernels to compute neighborhoods over which the class probabilities tend to be more homogeneous. As a result, better classification performance can be expected. The efficacy of our method is validated and compared against other competing techniques using a variety of data sets.
Cloning and characterization of three genes (SUT1–3 ) encoding glucose transporters of the yeast Pichia stipitis

We have identified and characterized three genes, SUT1, SUT2 and SUT3, that encode glucose transporters of the yeast Pichia stipitis. When expressed in a Saccharomyces cerevisiae hxt null mutant strain that is unable to take up monosaccharides, all three proteins restored growth on glucose. Sequencing of the genes revealed open reading frames coding for 553 amino acids in the case of SUT1, and for 550 amino acids in the case of SUT2 and of SUT3. The derived protein sequences are closely related to one another, and show distinct sequence similarities to the S. cerevisiae hexose transporter family and to monosaccharide transporters of other organisms. The Sut2 and Sut3 proteins are nearly identical and differ only in one amino acid. Determination of substrate specificities and kinetic parameters of the individual Sut proteins expressed in a S. cerevisiae hxt1–7 mutant revealed Sut1, Sut2 and Sut3 as glucose transporters with Km values in the millimolar range. The proteins were also able to transport xylose and other monosaccharides, but with a considerably lower affinity. In P. stipitistranscription of SUT1 was strongly induced by glucose and was independent of the oxygen supply. In contrast, SUT2 and SUT3 were only expressed under aerobic conditions, but independent of the carbon source. Cells disrupted for the SUT1 gene did not show any obvious growth phenotype, however low‐affinity glucose uptake was lost. Further investigations suggest that the Sut proteins constitute a subfamily of glucose transporters in P. stipitis, and that other and probably unrelated proteins exist additionally mediating high‐affinity glucose and xylose uptake.
Genome Sequence of Roseovarius sp. Strain MCTG156(2b) Isolated from a Phytoplankton Net Trawl on the Scottish West Coast

ABSTRACT Roseovarius sp. strain MCTG156(2b) was isolated from a phytoplankton net sample collected on the west coast of Scotland and was selected based on its ability to degrade polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Here, we present the genome sequence of this strain, which is 5,113,782 bp, with 5,142 genes and an average G+C content of 60.7%.
Feature Article - The Ellipsoid Method: A Survey

In February 1979 a note by L. G. Khachiyan indicated how an ellipsoid method for linear programming can be implemented in polynomial time. This result has caused great excitement and stimulated a flood of technical papers. Ordinarily there would be no need for a survey of work so recent, but the current circumstances are obviously exceptional. Word of Khachiyan's result has spread extraordinarily fast, much faster than comprehension of its significance. A variety of issues have, in general, not been well understood, including the exact character of the ellipsoid method and of Khachiyans result on polynomiality, its practical significance in linear programming, its implementation, its potential applicability to problems outside of the domain of linear programming, and its relationship to earlier work. Our aim is to help clarify these important issues in the context of a survey of the ellipsoid method, its historical antecedents, recent developments, and current research.
Operating system support for concurrent remote task creation

This paper describes improvements to the Mach microkernel's support for efficient application startup across multiple nodes in a cluster or massively parallel processor. Significant improvements in application startup times have been achieved by optimizing the existing remote task creation operation, implementing a facility to concurrently create multiple remote tasks in a single operation, and restructuring the underlying distributed virtual memory system to improve its scalability. One component of the restructuring involves the use of a hierarchical tree of objects to implement the paging path instead of a flat single level tree; this eliminates bottlenecks at the node that initiates the application. The other component consists of limiting the copy on write virtual memory optimization to single node operations; this achieves a separation of network sharing (read/write)from network read access (implemented by copy on reference). Although our implementation is specific to Mach, the architecture and design are applicable to other modern operating systems. <<ETX>>
Estimation of Aboveground Biomass in Alpine Forests: A Semi-Empirical Approach Considering Canopy Transparency Derived from Airborne LiDAR Data

In this study, a semi-empirical model that was originally developed for stem volume estimation is used for aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation of a spruce dominated alpine forest. The reference AGB of the available sample plots is calculated from forest inventory data by means of biomass expansion factors. Furthermore, the semi-empirical model is extended by three different canopy transparency parameters derived from airborne LiDAR data. These parameters have not been considered for stem volume estimation until now and are introduced in order to investigate the behavior of the model concerning AGB estimation. The developed additional input parameters are based on the assumption that transparency of vegetation can bemeasured by determining the penetration of the laser beams through the canopy. These parameters are calculated for every single point within the 3D point cloud in order to consider the varying properties of the vegetation in an appropriate way. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is performed to evaluate the influence of the additional LiDAR derived canopy transparency parameters for AGB estimation. The study is carried out in a 560 km2 alpine area in Austria, where reference forest inventory data and LiDAR data are available. The investigations show that the introduction of the canopy transparency parameters does not change the results significantly according to R2 (R2 = 0.70 to R2 = 0.71) in comparison to the results derived from, the semi-empirical model, which was originally developed for stem volume estimation.
Further Improvement of AdaBoost Algorithm

AdaBoost algorithm is a kind of very important feature classification machine learning algorithm, But if difficult samples exist in the training samples, With the iterative Number increasing, this easily leads to degeneration Phenomenon, and reduces the generalization ability of the classifier. In view of the face detection under complex background degeneration appeared problem, This article Proposes LWE-AdaBoost algorithm which can limit weight expansion, the experimental results indicate that the LWEAdaBoost algorithm can restrain the recurrence of degeneration Phenomenon well.
Investigating the accuracy of mobile urban sensing

Community urban sensing is one of the emerging applications enabled by the growing popularity of mobile user devices, like smartphones and in-vehicle monitoring systems. Such devices feature sensing and wireless communication capabilities, which enable them to sample large-scale phenomena, like air pollution and vehicular traffic congestion, and upload these data to the Internet. In this work, we focus on the above scenario and investigate the level of accuracy that can be achieved in estimating the phenomenon of interest through a mobile crowdsourcing application. Specifically, we take a signal processing-based approach and leverage results on signal reconstruction from sets of irregularly spaced samples. We apply such results to a realistic scenario where samples are collected by vehicular and pedestrian users, and study the accuracy level of the phenomenon estimation as the penetration rate of the sensing application varies.
Design of a High Sensitivity Structure for MEMS Fingerprint Sensor

A novel capacitive pressure sensor structure for fingerprint sensor/imager application is described which has higher sensitivity and linearity compared to all reported prototypes. The protrusion also has got a new shape to achieve the maximum sensitivity. Simulations have been done by FEM analysis and the results show the great improvements in output parameters. The technique can be applied to other capacitive structures as well.
A review of performance evaluation measures for hierarchical classifiers

Criteria for evaluating the performance of a classifier are an important part in its design. They allow to estimate the behavior of the generated classifier on unseen data and can be also used to compare its performance against the performance of classifiers generated by other classification algorithms. There are currently several performance measures for binary and flat classification problems. For hierarchical classification problems, where there are multiple classes which are hierarchically related, the evaluation step is more complex. This paper reviews the main evaluation metrics proposed in the literature to evaluate hierarchical classification models.
NEW CLASS OF RANDOM MATRIX ENSEMBLES WITH MULTIFRACTAL EIGENVECTORS

Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611(February 1, 2008)Three recently suggested random matrix ensembles (RME)are linked together to represent a class of RME with multifrac-tal eigenfunction statistics. The generic form of the two-levelcorrelation function for the case of weak and extremely strongmultifractality is suggested.PACS numbers: 71.25. -s, 72.15. Rn, 05.45+b