Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Breaking the memory secrecy assumption

Many countermeasures exist that attempt to protect against buffer overflow attacks on applications written in C and C++. The most widely deployed countermeasures rely on artificially introducing randomness in the memory image of the application. StackGuard and similar systems, for instance, will insert a random value before the return address on the stack, and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) will make the location of stack and/or heap less predictable for an attacker. A critical assumption in these probabilistic countermeasures is that attackers cannot read the contents of memory. In this paper we show that this assumption is not always justified. We identify a new class of vulnerabilities -- buffer overreads -- that occur in practice and that can be exploited to read parts of the memory contents of a process running a vulnerable application. We describe in detail how to exploit an application protected by both ASLR and stack canaries, if the application contains both a buffer overread and a buffer overflow vulnerability. We also provide a detailed discussion of how this vulnerability affects other, less widely deployed probabilistic countermeasures such as memory obfuscation and instruction set randomization.
Attitudes of the General Public and General Practitioners in Five Countries towards Pandemic and Seasonal Influenza Vaccines during Season 2009/2010

Background Vaccination coverage rates for seasonal influenza are not meeting national and international targets. Here, we investigated whether the 2009/2010 A/H1N1 pandemic influenza affected the uptake of influenza vaccines. Methodology/Principal Findings In December 2009/January 2010 and April 2010, 500 randomly selected members of the general public in Germany, France, the United States, China, and Mexico were surveyed by telephone about vaccination for seasonal and A/H1N1 pandemic influenza. Also, in April 2010, 100 randomly selected general practitioners were surveyed. Adult vaccine coverage in December 2009/January 2010 for A/H1N1 pandemic and seasonal influenza were, respectively, 12% and 29% in France, 11% and 25% in Germany, 41% and 46% in the US, 13% and 30% in Mexico, and 12% and 10% in China. Adult uptake rates in April 2010 were higher in Mexico but similar or slightly lower in the other countries. Coverage rates in children were higher than in adults in the US, Mexico, and China but mostly lower in Germany and France. Germans and French viewed the threat of A/H1N1 pandemic influenza as low to moderate, whereas Mexicans, Americans, and Chinese viewed it as moderate to serious, opinions generally mirrored by general practitioners. The recommendation of a general practitioner was a common reason for receiving the pandemic vaccine, while not feeling at risk and concerns with vaccine safety and efficacy were common reasons for not being vaccinated. Inclusion of the A/H1N1 pandemic strain increased willingness to be vaccinated for seasonal influenza in the United States, Mexico, and China but not in Germany or France. Conclusions/Significance The 2009/2010 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic increased vaccine uptake rates for seasonal influenza in Mexico but had little effect in other countries. Accurate communication of health information, especially by general practitioners, is needed to improve vaccine coverage rates.
Humoral Immune Response of Patients Receiving Specific Active Immunotherapy for Renal Cell Carcinoma 1

The object of this study was to characterize the antigens evoking an immune response in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) patients receiving specific active immunotherapy with irradiated autologous tumor cells and Corynebacterium pan/urn as adju vant. Seventy serum samples from 11 patients with RCC undergoing specific active immunotherapy were evaluated. Fifty of the 70 serum specimens (71%) had Â¡mmunoglobulin G anti body directed to autologous tumor cells. Absorption studies were completed on 4 patients (S. E., M. M., R. N., S. V.) with 2 patients (S. V. and M. M.) demonstrating reactivity to a RCC-associated antigen present on their autologous tumor cells. One patient's serum (R. N.) was absorbed not only with autologous tumor cells but also with an allogeneic RCC cell line. The fourth patient's (S. E.) serum reactivity was able to be absorbed only with autolo gous tumor cells and several, but not all, of the clones of that autologous cell line. Patient S. E. serum binding by clones of RCC cell line RPMI-SE was seen to vary from no ability to bind RPMI-SE in some clones to double the parental binding in others. Consistent with this finding was the demonstration that high serum-binding clones could absorb Patient S. E. serum reactivity to autologous RCC cells, while low binding clones could not. These data suggest a measure of heterogeneity among the parental RCC cell line, as demonstrated by its clones. This study has shown that the autologous tumor vaccine with adjuvant used here was an immunogenic therapeutic agent. The response mounted by these patients was a response to a RCC-associated antigen with the level of reactivity changing with the number of immunizations and disease status. Also suggested by this work is the possible primary tumor heterogeneity, as demonstrated by the differential reactivity seen among clones of a RCC cell line established from such a primary tumor.
Quantitative analysis of the velocity related pathophysiology of spasticity and rigidity in the elbow flexors

Objective: To quantify velocity dependent and position related properties of increased muscle tone measured during a constant velocity stretch. Methods: Elbow flexors were vertically stretched under four different velocities (40, 80, 120, and 160°/s) through a 75° range of motion in 12 patients with hemiparesis, 16 with parkinsonism, and 12 normal controls. From reactive torque measurement, a linear second order model was adopted to dissociate velocity dependent viscous and velocity independent elastic components. The averaged speed dependent reflex torque (ASRT)—defined as the deviation of measured torque from baseline torque—was used to quantify the viscous component of hypertonia. Velocity sensitivity of ASRT (VASRT) and segmented ASRT (SASRT), derived from the slope of the regression line among ASRT velocity plots and from segmentations of reactive torque, respectively, were used to differentiate the increased muscle tone of spasticity and rigidity. Results: ASRT and VASRT were significantly higher in both spasticity and rigidity than in normal controls. SASRT analysis showed three different position related patterns among spasticity, rigidity, and normal groups: spasticity showed progressively increasing muscle tension relative to position; rigidity showed increased (relative to the norm) but constant muscle tone over the entire stretch range; the normal control group showed a consistently low reactive torque over the entire range. Conclusions: Velocity dependence analysis indicates that rigidity and spasticity have approximately equal velocity dependent properties. For differentiating these two types of hypertonia, position dependent properties my be employed.
The ANIBES Study on Energy Balance in Spain: Design, Protocol and Methodology

Energy Balance (EB) is an important topic to understand how an imbalance in its main determinants (energy intake and consumption) may lead to inappropriate weight gain, considered to be “dynamic” and not “static”. There are no studies to evaluate EB in Spain, and new technologies reveal themselves as key tools to solve common problems to precisely quantify energy consumption and expenditure at population level. The overall purpose of the ANIBES (“Anthropometry, Intake and Energy Balance”) Study was to carry out an accurate updating of food and beverage intake, dietary habits/behaviour and anthropometric data of the Spanish population (9–75 years, n = 2009), as well as the energy expenditure and physical activity patterns. Anthropometry measurements (weight, height, body mass index, waist circumference, % body fat, % body water) were obtained; diet was evaluated throughout a three-day dietary record (tablet device) accompanied by a 24 h-dietary recall; physical activity was quantified by questionnaire and accelerometers were also employed. Finally, information about perception and understanding of several issues related to EB was also obtained. The ANIBES study will contribute to provide valuable useful data to inform food policy planning, food based dietary guidelines development and other health oriented actions in Spain.
Simple Wald Tests of the Fractional Integration Parameter: an Overview of New Results

This paper presents an overview of some new results regarding an easily imple-mentable Wald test-statistic (EFDF test) of the null hypotheses that a time-series process is I(1) or I(0) against fractional I(d) alternatives, with d ∈ (0, 1), allowing for unknown deterministic components and serial correlation in the error term. Specifically , we argue that the EFDF test has better power properties under fixed alternatives than other available tests for fractional integration, as well as analyze how to implement this test when the determinitic components or the long-memory parameter are subject to structural breaks. of David F. Hendry, whose influence on our research has been much more permanent than the long-memory processes considered here. We are grateful to the Editors, two anonymous referees and Carlos Velasco for many insightful comments. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grants SEJ2007-63098, SEJ2006-00369 and SEJ2004-04101, and also from the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.
An i-Vector Representation of Acoustic Environments for Audio-Based Video Event Detection on User Generated Content

Audio-based video event detection (VED) on user-generated content (UGC) aims to find videos that show an observable event such as a wedding ceremony or birthday party rather than a sound, such as music, clapping or singing. The difficulty of video content analysis on UGC lies in the acoustic variability and lack of structure of the data. The UGC task has been explored mainly by computer vision, but can be benefited by the used of audio. The i-vector system is state-of-the-art in Speaker Verification, and is outperforming a conventional Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based approach. The system compensates for undesired acoustic variability and extracts information from the acoustic environment, making it a meaningful choice for detection on UGC. This paper employs the i-vector-based system for audio-based VED on UGC and expands the understanding of the system on the task. It also includes a performance comparison with the conventional GMM-based and state-of-the-art Random Forest (RF)-based systems. The i-vector system aids audio-based event detection by addressing UGC audio characteristics. It outperforms the GMM-based system, and is competitive with the RF-based system in terms of the Missed Detection (MD) rate at 4% and 2.8% False Alarm (FA) rates, and complements the RF-based system by demonstrating slightly improvement in combination over the standalone systems.
Ultrastructural localization of giardins to the edges of disk microribbons of Giarida lamblia and the nucleotide and deduced protein sequence of alpha giardin

The giardins are a group of 29-38-kD proteins in the ventral disk of the protozoan parasite Giardia lamblia. The disk attaches the parasite to the host's intestinal epithelium and is composed of parallel, coiled microtubules that are adjacent to the ventral plasma membrane and from which processes called microribbons extend into the cytoplasm; the microribbons are connected by crossbridges. G. lamblia cytoskeletons, consisting of disks and attached flagella, were isolated and used to show that the 29-38-kD proteins separate into five bands by one- dimensional electrophoresis and into 23 species by two-dimensional analysis. Rabbit antibodies raised against a 33-kD protein band, purified by one-dimensional gel electrophoresis and shown to contain three proteins by two-dimensional electrophoresis, recognized 17 proteins by two-dimensional immunoblot analysis. By immunofluorescence these antibodies reacted with the ventral disk but not with the flagella in isolated cytoskeletons. Electron microscopy revealed that the anti-giardin antibodies bound to the edges of the microribbons but not to the microtubules, crossbridges, or other, nondisk structures. Antibodies to tubulin reacted with both the disk and flagella in isolated cytoskeletons but bound only to the microtubules in these structures. The amino-terminal sequence of the 33-kD immunogen was determined and used to construct a DNA oligomer, and the oligomer was used to isolate the alpha giardin gene. The gene was used to hybrid select RNA, and the in vitro translation product from this RNA was precipitated by the antibodies against the 33-kD immunogen. The gene sequence was a single open reading frame of 885 nucleotides that predicted a protein of 33.8 kD. The protein sequence is unique, having no significant homology to two other giardin sequences or to any sequences within the Protein Identification Resource. It is predicted to be 82% alpha helical. The downstream sequence of the gene indicates that the sequence AGT-PuAA is located six to nine nucleotides beyond the stop codon in all protein-encoding genes of G. lamblia that have been sequenced and reported to date.
The Amber system: parallel programming on a network of multiprocessors

This paper describes a programming system called Amber that permits a single application program to use a homogeneous network of computers in a uniform way, making the network appear to the application as an integrated multiprocessor. Amber is specifically designed for high performance in the case where each node in the network is a shared-memory multiprocessor. Amber shows that support for loosely-coupled multiprocessing can be efficiently realized using an object-based programming model. Amber programs execute in a uniform network-wide object space, with memory coherence maintained at the object level. Careful data placement and consistency control are essential for reducing communication overhead in a loosely-coupled system. Amber programmers use object migration primitives to control the location of data and processing.
Bridging the enduring gender gap in political interest in Europe: The relevance of promoting gender equality

Notwithstanding the improvement in gender equality in political power and resources in European democracies, this study shows that, on average, declared interest in politics is 16 per cent lower for women than for men in Europe. This gap remains even after controlling for differences in men's and women's educational attainment, material and cognitive resources. Drawing on the newly developed European Institute for Gender Equality's (EIGE) Gender Equality Index (GEI) and on the European Social Survey (ESS) fifth wave, we show that promoting gender equality contributes towards narrowing the magnitude of the differences in political interest between men and women. However, this effect appears to be conditioned by the age of citizens. More specifically, findings show that in Europe gender-friendly policies contribute to bridging the gender gap in political engagement only during adulthood, suggesting that childhood socialisation is more strongly affected by traditional family values than by policies promoting gender equality. In contrast, feminising social citizenship does make a difference by reducing the situational disadvantages traditionally faced by women within the family and in society for middle-aged people and older.
Regrammation and paradigmatization: Diachronic analysis of a number of progressive periphrases in French1

ABSTRACT In the present article, our purpose is to characterize each of the periphrases expressing progressivity Pierre est / va / s’en va / vient / s’en vient chantant, Pierre est à / après chanter, Pierre est en train de chanter as members of a progressive paradigm, and to provide arguments in favour of including the so-called deictic relative construction (Je vois) Pierre qui chante in this paradigm. Our arguments comprise diachronic, diastratic, Francophone, and Creole evidence. In Kragh and Schøsler (2014), we have examined in detail this construction, focusing on the grammaticalization process and, in particular, on the reanalysis and actualization process. We here propose an analysis of the deictic relative as yet another way of expressing progressivity. If our analysis is correct, the deictic relative should be considered as a member of the French tense, aspect, and mode (TAM) paradigm.
Comparative impact of diverse regulatory loci on Staphylococcus aureus biofilm formation

The relative impact of 23 mutations on biofilm formation was evaluated in the USA300, methicillin‐resistant strain LAC. Mutation of sarA, atl, codY, rsbU, and sigB limited biofilm formation in comparison to the parent strain, but the limitation imposed by mutation of sarA was greater than that imposed by mutation of any of these other genes. The reduced biofilm formation of all mutants other than the atl mutant was correlated with increased levels of extracellular proteases. Mutation of fur‐ and mgrA‐enhanced biofilm formation but in LAC had no impact on protease activity, nuclease activity, or accumulation of the polysaccharide intercellular adhesin (PIA). The increased capacity of these mutants to form a biofilm was reversed by mutation of sarA, and this was correlated with increased protease production. Mutation of sarA, mgrA, and sigB had the same phenotypic effect in the methicillin‐sensitive strain UAMS‐1, but mutation of codY increased rather than decreased biofilm formation. As with the UAMS‐1 mgrA mutant, this was correlated with increased production of PIA. Examination of four additional clinical isolates suggests that the differential impact of codY on biofilm formation may be a conserved characteristic of methicillin‐resistant versus methicillin‐sensitive strains.
Heuristics in Physical Design Partitioning: A review

In the field of electronic design automation physical design of integrated circuits is one of the most interesting and challenging areas. During physical design, all design components are instantiated with their geometric representations and directly impacts circuit performance, area, reliability, power, and manufacturing yield. Due to its high complexity, physical design is split into several key steps. One of the vital stages of Physical Design is Partitioning in which a circuit is broken up into smaller sub-circuits or modules which can each be designed or analyzed individually, subject to design constraints such as maximum partition sizes and maximum path delay. In this paper, we study about the various heuristic approaches towards the circuit partitioning problems. We have also given a comparative analysis of different algorithms which have been proposed so far in solving this partitioning problem.
On Construction of Hybrid Logistic Regression-Naïve Bayes Model for Classification

In recent years, several authors have described a hybrid discriminative-generative model for classification. In this paper we examine construction of such hybrid models from data where we use logistic regression (LR) as a discriminative component, and naı̈ve Bayes (NB) as a generative component. First, we estimate a Markov blanket of the class variable to reduce the set of features. Next, we use a heuristic to partition the set of features in the Markov blanket into those that are assigned to the LR part, and those that are assigned to the NB part of the hybrid model. The heuristic is based on reducing the conditional dependence of the features in NB part of the hybrid model given the class variable. We implement our method on 21 different classification datasets, and we compare the prediction accuracy of hybrid models with those of pure LR and pure NB models.
Language independent analysis and classification of discussion threads in Coursera MOOC forums

In this work, we analyze the discussion threads from the forums of 60 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by Coursera and taught in 4 different languages. The types of interactions in such threads vary: there are discussions on close ended problems (e.g. solutions to assignments), open ended topics, course logistics, or just small talk among fellow students. We first study the evolution of the forum activities with respect to the normalized course duration. Then we investigate several language independent features to classify the discussion threads based on the types of the interactions among the users. We use default Coursera subforum categories (Study Groups, Assignments, Lectures, .) to define the classes of interest and so the labels. We extract features related to structure, popularity, temporal dynamics of threads and diversity of the ids of the users. Text related features, word count aside, are avoided to apply the methods across discussion threads written in different languages and with various technical terminologies. Experiments show a classification performance with ROCAUC between 0.58 and 0.89, depending on the subforum class considered and with possibly noisy labels.
A Numerical Approach for Modeling the Human Upper Limb

The paper presents a dynamic model considering the human upper limb as a mechanic system with 6 degrees of freedom where the segments are moved by their own weight forces. The bones were modeled in Solid Works, the model of the upper limb obtained being very close as form to the real one. Based on this model, the calculus of mass proprieties was made. The differential equations of velocities obtained were solved using Lagrange formalism with help of Matlab programs. A dynamic model must provide a good approximation of total weight and mass distribution as well as transmissibility and amortization proprieties for bones, muscles and joints.
Simultaneous Localization and Grasping as a Belief Space Control Problem

Most approaches to grasp planning assume that the configurations of the object to be grasped and any potential obstacles are known perfectly. As a result, implementations of these “perfect information” approaches to grasp synthesis are necessarily preceded by a perception stage where the the state of the object and obstacles are estimated. Unfortunately, small perceptual errors during the perception stage can cause even good grasp plans to fail. A potentially more robust approach would be to combine perception and grasp synthesis in a single process. We formalize the problem of achieving this as simultaneous localization and grasping (SLAG). The objective of SLAG is to reach what is very likely to be a good grasp configuration given initial uncertainty by actively perceiving the environment. Given this formalization, SLAG can be viewed as an instance of the belief space control problem. This paper applies a new approach to belief space control that is effective in non-Gaussian belief spaces [17]. The approach is demonstrated in a SLAG problem where a robot must locate a cardboard box using a wrist-mounted laser scanner and grasp it. If a second box occludes the box to be grasped, the robot must either move the laser scanner or push the occluding box out of the way. We empirically demonstrate that our approach is capable of solving this problem and present results over many trials.