Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A public-key cryptosystem with worst-case/average-case equivalence

We present a probabilistic public key cryptosystem which is secure unless the worst case of the following lattice problem can be solved in polynomial time: “Find the shortest nonzero vector in an n dimensional lattice L where the shortest vector v is unique in the sense that any other vector whose length is at most n’ [lullis parallel to v. ”
Multi-Chain Prefetching: Exploiting Memory Parallelism in Pointer-Chasing Codes

As the processor-memory performance gap continues to widen, application performance becomes increasingly limited by the memory system. Applications that employ linked data structures (LDSs) are particularly challenging from the standpoint of the memory system because of the memory serialization eeects associated with indirect memory addressing. Also known as the pointer chasing problem, such memory serialization eeects prevent latency tolerance techniques from overlapping the cache misses suuered along a chain of indirect memory references. Consequently, latency tolerance techniques are limited in their ability to tolerate the latency of cache misses arising from pointer chasing. While pointer-chasing is inherently sequential, pointer-chasing computations typically traverse multiple pointer chains in an independent fashion. Such independent pointer-chasing traversals represent a large source of memory parallelism. This paper explores the possibility of exploiting such memory par-allelism for the purposes of memory latency tolerance. First, we present a memory scheduling algorithm that computes a prefetch schedule from an LDS traversal speciication that overlaps serialized memory fetches across multiple pointer-chasing traversals. Second, we present a prefetch engine architecture capable of traversing LDSs. Our prefetch engine issues prefetches according to the prefetch schedule, thus exploiting the memory parallelism uncovered by our scheduling algorithm. Finally, we conduct an experimental evaluation of our prefetching technique on four pointer-chasing applications. Our results show multi-chain prefetching increases performance between 52% and 78%. However, early initiation of prefetches causes prefetch buuer thrashing, thus limiting further increases in performance. Additional simulations show that prefetch buuer thrashing can be eliminated in some cases by using a larger prefetch buuer and by reducing the conservative prefetch distances computed by our scheduling algorithm.
Exploring the Relationship Between Sleep and Pain

Disclosure: Lynn R. Webster, MD, FACPM, FASAM, has disclosed that he has served as a consultant to Advanced Bionics, Cephalon, Covidien, Elan, Elite Pharmaceuticals, Medtronic, Inc, Meda AB, and ZARS Pharma. Dr. Webster has also disclosed that he has received research grants from Abbott, Advanced Bionic, Alpharma Pharmaceuticals, Ameritox, Ltd, Array BioPharma, Astra Zeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Cervelo Pharmaceuticals, CoMentis, DURECT Corp, Elan, Elite, Forest, GlaxoSmithKline, Jazz, King Pharmaceutical, Medtronic, Inc, Merck, Nektar Therapeutics, Neuroges X, Pain Therapeutics, Inc., Purdue Pharma, QRx Pharma, Respironics, Takeda, TorreyPines Therapeutics, Wyeth, and ZARS Pharma. Dr. Webster has also disclosed that that he has served on the advisory boards of Alpharma Pharmaceuticals, Ameritox, Ltd, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, King Pharmaceuticals, Nektar Therapeutics, Nervo, Neuromed, Purdue Pharma, and QRx Pharma.
Coordination of theory and evidence: Effect of epistemological theories on students' laboratory practice

Students' views about science were correlated with their approaches to lab practice. Three distinct cases are discussed in detail: empiricist-oriented, rationalist-oriented, and constructivist-oriented students. A coherent epistemological theory was constructed for each case, by considering the different degrees of certainty and confidence each student attributed to theoretical versus experimental knowledge in science. These theories could explain the difference between the students' methods of preparation for the lab session and their approaches to writing the lab report. It was shown that overconfidence in one type of knowledge led to oversimplification of the relation between theory and evidence. Findings suggest that epistemological theories play a crucial role in determining whether and how students coordinate theory and empirical evidence in their lab practice. Inspecting and correcting students' lab reports in accordance with these findings can offer an easy way to identify students' epistemological theories and to provide appropriate feedback. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 44: 1134–1159, 2007
Beyond ‘Choice or Force’: Roma Mobility in Albania and the Mixed Migration Paradigm

One of the dichotomies which has affected migration studies for some time is that between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ movements. Yet there is a growing realisation of the importance of understanding how the two overlap. Focusing on the Albanian Roma, this paper adds weight to the argument that a ‘mixed migration’ approach is necessary to understand a number of migratory situations which do not neatly fit the forced/voluntary categorisation. The paper draws on empirical material collected through household questionnaires, in-depth interviews, group discussions and ethnographic observation during 2007–08 within the framework of a broader study on gender, remittances and development in Albania.
Longitudinal study of the results of continuous improvement in an industrial company

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show a real experience of how a scheme of continuous improvement has been gradually transformed, from a very unsuccessful start, passing through different phases and finally delivering results for the firm.Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyse the evolution of the formal programs of continuous improvement of a firm in a traditional sector (food). The data for the research were gathered by means of participatory observation over the course of 18 months spent in the firm attending the meetings of the improvement teams.Findings – Both programs (individual and group) have proved to be very profitable for the company. However, there is no magic formula for the correct operation of the system of continuous improvement. The existing system has to be continually improved, correcting faults and trying always to contribute something new to re‐launch the system regularly.Practical implications – This study has also permitted the authors to highlight the importanc.
Qualia Modification in Noun-Noun Compounds: A Cross-Language Survey

In analyzing the formation of a given compound, both its internal syntactic structure and semantic relations need to be considered. The Generative Lexicon Theory (GL Theory) provides us with an explanatory model of compounds that captures the qualia modification relations in the semantic composition within a compound, which can be applied to natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we primarily discuss the qualia structure of noun-noun compounds found in Chinese as well as a couple of other languages like German, Spanish, Japanese and Italian. We briefly review the construction of compounds and focus on the noun-noun construction. While analyzing the semantic relationship between the words that compose a compound, we use the GL Theory to demonstrate that the proposed qualia structure enables compositional interpretation within the compound. Besides, we attempt to examine whether or not for each semantic head, its modifier can fit in one of the four quales. Finally, our analysis reveals the potentials and limits of qualia-based treatment of composition of nominal compounds and suggests a path for future work.
New Production Regulates Export Stoichiometry in the Ocean

The proportion in which carbon and growth-limiting nutrients are exported from the oceans’ productive surface layer to the deep sea is a crucial parameter in models of the biological carbon pump. Based on >400 vertical flux observations of particulate organic carbon (POC) and nitrogen (PON) from the European Arctic Ocean we show the common assumption of constant C:N stoichiometry not to be met. Exported POC:PON ratios exceeded the classical Redfield atomic ratio of 6.625 in the entire region, with the largest deviation in the deep Central Arctic Ocean. In this part the mean exported POC:PON ratio of 9.7 (a:a) implies c. 40% higher carbon export compared to Redfield-based estimates. When spatially integrated, the potential POC export in the European Arctic was 10–30% higher than suggested by calculations based on constant POC:PON ratios. We further demonstrate that the exported POC:PON ratio varies regionally in relation to nitrate-based new production over geographical scales that range from the Arctic to the subtropics, being highest in the least productive oligotrophic Central Arctic Ocean and subtropical gyres. Accounting for variations in export stoichiometry among systems of different productivity will improve the ability of models to resolve regional patterns in carbon export and, hence, the oceans’ contribution to the global carbon cycle will be predicted more accurately.
Natural Language Generation for dialogue: system survey

Many natural language dialogue systems make use of `canned text' for output generation. This approach may be su±cient for dialogues in restricted domains where system utterances are short and simple and use fixed expressions (e.g., slot filling dialogues in the ticket reservation or travel information domain); but for more sophisticated dialogues (e.g., tutoring dialogues) a more advanced generation method is required. In such dialogues, the system utterances should be produced in a context-sensitive fashion, for instance by pronominalising anaphoric references, and by using more or less elaborate wording depending on the state of the dialogue, the expertise of the user, etc. In the case of spoken dialogues, it is very useful if the natural language generation component can provide information that is relevant for determining the prosody of the speech output. Similarly, for use in embodied agents it is useful if the generation component can provide information about the facial and body movements that should accompany the language being produced by the agent. Clearly, it will be extremely di±cult to achieve all this using simple string manipulation, so a more flexible and context-sensitive generation method is required. This report discusses some of the possibilities for the sophisticated generation of system utterances in a dialogue system. The basic assumption is that this task is performed by a separate language generation module, which takes as its input a message specification produced by a dialogue planner and transforms this message into an expression in natural language. Part I of this report provides a general discussion of different methods for performing this task, and outlines some requirements on language generation systems that might be used for this purpose. Part II gives an overview of publicly available language generation systems, and discusses to what extent they meet the previously stated requirements.
Regulation by interferon alpha of immunoglobulin isotype selection and lymphokine production in mice

Antigens and infectious agents that stimulate interferon alpha(IFN- alpha) production in mice induce antibody responses that are predominantly of the immunoglobulin (Ig)G2a isotype and contain little or no IgE. This suggested the possibility that IFN-alpha might have a role in directing Ig isotype selection. Consistent with this possibility, we have found that injection of mice with recombinant mouse IFN-alpha suppresses IgE secretion, enhances IgG2a secretion, and has no independent effect on IgG1 secretion in mice stimulated with a foreign anti-IgD antibody. Injection of mice with polyinosinic acid.polycytidylic acid (poly I.C), an inducer of macrophage IFN-alpha production, also suppresses the anti-IgD antibody-induced IgE response and stimulates the IgG2a response; these effects are blocked by a sheep antibody that neutralizes mouse IFN-alpha/beta. Both recombinant IFN- alpha and poly I.C have maximum IgE suppressive and IgG2a stimulatory effects when injected early in the anti-IgD antibody-induced immune response. Addition of IFN-alpha to mouse B cells cultured with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) + interleukin 4 (IL-4) suppresses both IgG1 and IgE production, but much less potently than IFN-gamma. IFN-alpha suppresses anti-IgD antibody-induced increases in the level of splenic IL-4 mRNA, but enhances the anti-IgD antibody-induced increase in the splenic level of IFN-gamma mRNA. These results are consistent with the effect of IFN-alpha on Ig isotype expression in mice, as IL-4 stimulates IgE and suppresses IgG2a secretion while IFN-gamma exerts opposite effects. These observations suggest that antigen presenting cells, by secreting IFN-alpha early in the course of an immune response, can influence the nature of that response both through direct effects on B cells and by influencing the differentiation of T cells.
Crystal Structure of Deinococcus radiodurans RecQ Helicase Catalytic Core Domain: The Interdomain Flexibility

RecQ DNA helicases are key enzymes in the maintenance of genome integrity, and they have functions in DNA replication, recombination, and repair. In contrast to most RecQs, RecQ from Deinococcus radiodurans (DrRecQ) possesses an unusual domain architecture that is crucial for its remarkable ability to repair DNA. Here, we determined the crystal structures of the DrRecQ helicase catalytic core and its ADP-bound form, revealing interdomain flexibility in its first RecA-like and winged-helix (WH) domains. Additionally, the WH domain of DrRecQ is positioned in a different orientation from that of the E. coli RecQ (EcRecQ). These results suggest that the orientation of the protein during DNA-binding is significantly different when comparing DrRecQ and EcRecQ.
Uniprocessor Virtual Memory without TLBs

We present a feasibility study for performing virtual address translation without specialized translation hardware. Removing address translation hardware and instead managing address translation in software has the potential to make the processor design simpler, smaller, and more energy-efficient at little or no cost in performance. The purpose of this study is to describe the design and quantify its performance impact. Trace-driven simulations show that software-managed address translation is just as efficient as hardware-managed address translation. Moreover, mechanisms to support such features as shared memory, superpages, fine-grained protection, and sparse address spaces can be defined completely in software, allowing for more flexibility than in hardware-defined mechanisms.
Reach & Grasp Therapy: Design and Control of a 9-DOF Robotic Neuro-rehabilitation System

This paper presents the Gentle/G integrated system for reach & grasp therapy retraining following brain injury. The design, control and integration of an experimental grasp assistance unit is described for use in robot assisted stroke rehabilitation. The grasp assist unit is intended to work with the hardware and software of the Gentle/S robot although the hardware could be adapted to other rehabilitation applications. When used with the Gentle/S robot a total of 6 active and 3 passive degrees of freedom are available to provide active, active assist or passive grasp retraining in combination with reaching movements in a reach-grasp-transfer-release sequence.
Bacterial topoisomerase I as a target for discovery of antibacterial compounds

Bacterial topoisomerase I is a potential target for discovery of new antibacterial compounds. Mutant topoisomerases identified by SOS induction screening demonstrated that accumulation of the DNA cleavage complex formed by type IA topoisomerases is bactericidal. Characterization of these mutants of Yersinia pestis and Escherichia coli topoisomerase I showed that DNA religation can be inhibited while maintaining DNA cleavage activity by decreasing the binding affinity of Mg(II) ions. This can be accomplished either by mutation of the TOPRIM motif involved directly in Mg(II) binding or by altering the charge distribution of the active site region. Besides being used to elucidate the key elements for the control of the cleavage-religation equilibrium, the SOS-inducing mutants of Y. pestis and E. coli topoisomerase I have also been utilized as models to study the cellular response following the accumulation of bacterial topoisomerase I cleavage complex. Bacterial topoisomerase I is required for preventing hypernegative supercoiling of DNA during transcription. It plays an important role in transcription of stress genes during bacterial stress response. Topoisomerase I targeting poisons may be particularly effective when the bacterial pathogen is responding to host defense, or in the presence of other antibiotics that induce the bacterial stress response.
Privacy-Preserving Data Mining Systems

Although successful in many applications, data mining poses special concerns for private data. An integrated architecture takes a systemic view of the problem, implementing established protocols for data collection, inference control, and information sharing. Our goal in investigating privacy preservation issues was to take a systemic view of architectural requirements and design principles and explore possible solutions that would lead to guidelines for building practical privacy-preserving data mining systems
Modified Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Variable Selection in QSAR Modeling: QSAR Studies of Cyclooxygenase Inhibitors

A new version of an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm has been proposed. A modified ACO algorithm is proposed to select variables in QSAR modeling and to predict inhibiting action of some diarylimidazole derivatives on cyclooxygenase (COX) enzyme. As a comparison to this method, the evolution algorithm (EA) was also tested. Experimental results have demonstrated that the modified ACO is a useful tool for variable selection that needs few parameters to be adjusted and converges quickly toward the optimal position.
Image-driven navigation of analytical BRDF models

Specifying parameters of analytic BRDF models is a difficult task as these parameters are often not intuitive for artists and their effect on appearance can be non-uniform. Ideally, a given step in the parameter space should produce a predictable and perceptually-uniform change in the rendered image. Systems that employ psychophysics have produced important advances in this direction; however, the requirement of user studies limits scalability of these approaches. In this work, we propose a new and intuitive method for designing material appearance. First, we define a computational metric between BRDFs that is based on rendered images of a scene under natural illumination. We show that our metric produces results that agree with previous perceptual studies. Next, we propose a user interface that allows for navigation in the remapped parameter space of a given BRDF model. For the current settings of the BRDF parameters, we display a choice of variations corresponding to uniform steps according to our metric, in the various parameter directions. In addition to the parametric navigation for a single model, we also support neighborhood navigation in the space of all models. By clustering a large number of neighbors and removing neighbors that are close to the current model, the user can easily visualize the alternate effects that can only be expressed with other models. We show that our interface is simple and intuitive. Furthermore, visual navigation in the BRDF space both in the local model and the union space is an effective way for reflectance design.
Reading the Power of Printed Orality in Afghanistan: Popular Pashto Literature as Historical Evidence and Public Intervention

How can one use folk and popular evidence for non-western and non-elite rural social history in periods that are sparsely documented by other forms of evidence? That is, what if oral literature is the majority of what there is? While oral literatures contain a great deal of information for historians, this claim is not necessarily premised on a transparent reading of explicit information in specific works. How might we see processes of written mediation and transmission of (originally) oral literature as providing us with more information, rather than as distorting a primary source? And how might we productively approach heavily stylized lyric genres which provide seemingly little social information? Through the intertwined analysis of rural poetry and biodata related to eastern Afghanistan in the late 1940s and 1950s, provided in a genre of biographical directory called tazkira, I argue for a dynamic reading of popular literatures as documentary evidence and as political weapons that were designed to create social change and catalyze new types of political awareness. I argue that the historian’s attention to changes in literary genres and changing construals of the “ideal addressee” in these texts can illuminate social change.
Trust and Reputation Models Comparison

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse and describe several trust and reputation models for distributed and heterogeneous networks and compare some of them in order to provide an evaluation amongst some of the most relevant works in this field.Design/methodology/approach – The authors have developed a trust and reputation models simulator for wireless sensor networks, called TRMSim‐WSN, and implemented several trust models for distributed networks in order to test their accuracy as well as their resilience against a set of specific security threats that can be applied in these particular systems, as the paper will show.Findings – The analysis of the outcomes obtained from the experiments revealed that while some models have a reasonably good performance against certain security threats, none of them behaves as would be desired under any circumstances.Research limitations/implications – Ongoing work is focused on the implementation of several trust and reputation models in the simulator TRMSim‐W.
Software Defect Report and Tracking System in the Internet: Controlling the Evolution of Legacy Systems

This paper describes a project of Empirical Software Engineering that uses Internet technology to implement a software defect report and tracking system, called SofTrack, in a geographically distributed organisation. SofTrack is being used to help controlling the evolution of four medium to large size software systems, on different levels of maturity. They belong to the Portuguese Navy Information Systems Infrastructure and were developed using typical legacy systems technology: COBOL with embedded SQL for queries in a Relational Database environment. While SofTrack provides the typical functionality of tracking systems, it also embeds tools for the automatic documentation of source code and software complexity analysis. This combination of features helps the management of the maintenance team activity.