Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Idols with Feet of Clay: On the Security of Bootloaders and Firmware Updaters for the IoT

IoT devices are generally implemented with low-cost embedded solutions, and connectivity and communication capabilities are the raison d’être of such devices. But this is a double-edged sword, since connectivity also implies (1) to open the door to more attack possibilities, and (2) the targeted system, once breached, can be the support for attacks at a larger scale, possibly involving many connected systems. Our observation is that such devices lack proper hardware and software security protections. Bootloader and Firmware Update (BFU) mechanisms are critical components in the software stack of IoT devices. BFUs are a target of choice since they use the highest privileges and are executed before the system's security policy is set up. An attacker able to compromise the BFU can gain full control over the target system. Moreover, the update mechanism often supported by the BFU is essential to ensure devices can be upgraded and maintained for a long time. If not properly secured, the BFU allows an attacker to gain control over a system throughout its whole lifetime, including future upgrades. In this paper, we provide an overview of the threats targeting BFUs, and existing protections. We cover the hardware and software attacks that are known to the scientific literature. Also, we argue that vulnerabilities to physical attacks, in particular to fault injection attacks, are mostly left un-attended.
IMPACT OF ICT PENETRATION ON ECONOMIC GROWTH: ANALYZING THE CO-INTEGRATING AND CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP IN 144 COUNTRIES BASED ON NETWORK READINESS INDEX

The aim of the study was to understand long run co-integrating and causal relationship between the real GDP per capita and ICT penetration, and to benchmark it against the country ranking presented by the Network Readiness Index (NRI). To achieve this, data for mobile, fixed and internet connections per 100 people is taken from World Bank for 144 countries which are selected through NRI. The sum of connections is defined as the ICT penetration, whereas the second variable real GDP per capita is taken from World Bank Database. Panel unit root tests are performed to assess level of integration between the variables. To find the cointegration relationship, a panel error correction model is used. Dynamic fixed effect model is used with a system GMM estimator to test for instruments and endogeneity, whereas Wald Tests provide information on causal relationship between the variables. The data set is divided into six panels; five based on rankings from NRI and one panel representing the complete list of 144 countries. Co-integrating relationship is observed only for very highly and highly ranked countries. Bidirectional Causality is observed only in very highly ranked countries, whereas unidirectional causality is observed from real GDP per capita to ICT in all other cases except in highly ranked countries where causality moves unidirectional from ICT to real GDP per capita.
MCMC algorithms for structured multivariate normal models

In this paper we look at the use of MCMC methods for the general class of structured multivariate Normal (SMVN) models. These models consider a response vector as following a multivariate normal distribution with a limited number of parameters representing the mean vector and variance matrix. We in particular look at how multilevel models can be represented in this framework and show that a simple random walk Metropolis algorithm for such models can be very quick and outperform MCMC algorithms for the equivalent model in the standard ‘random effects’ framework on some simple examples. We show however that this computational advantage only holds for very simple models. We discuss model comparison which is more natural in this framework. We finish with discussion of other models that fit naturally in the framework and link to other work on these models.
Optimization of Micro Electrical Discharge Machining Parameters of Ti- 6Al-4V

All rights reserved by www.ijsrd. com 130 Optimization of Micro Electrical Discharge Machining Parameters of Ti6Al-4V Rajkumar P 1 Muralidharan S Nagendiran B Parthipan M Sivanantham K 1,2,3,4,5 Assistant Professor 1,2,3,4,5 Department of Mechanical Engineering 1,2,3,4,5 Muthyammal Engineering College, Rasipuram, Namakkal, India Abstract— Electrical Discharge Machining (μEDM) appears to be very promising as a future micromachining technique since in many areas of applications it offers several advantages. Brass (500μm) electrode is used as tool and Ti6Al-4V is used as work piece. Different parameters, such as the Current, Pulse on time and Pulse off time are used to get the aperture’s size. Dielectric is De-ionized water. In μEDM setup, the dielectric flow circulating system is essential and must be considered carefully, otherwise the dirty dielectric will flow into the machining chamber again and cause second discharging of the work piece and infect the aperture’s sizes. Because the Brass electrode is too small, a use current passing will destroy the Brass electrode. Analysis indicates the most effective zone of predominant process parameters such as Current, Pulse on time and Pulse off time which give the appreciable amount of Material Removal Rate (MRR) with less Over Cut (OC). The experimental results and analysis on μEDM will open up more application possibilities for μEDM. This result shows the Current play an important part in the MEMS.
The Stereological and Morphometrical Analysis of Metapodium in Tuj and Morkaraman Sheep

This recent study aimed to evaluating metapodium as morphometrical and stereological in the Morkaraman and Tuj sheep races. For this purpose, one-year old 40 Morkaraman (20 female, 20 male) and 40 Tuj (20 female, 20 male), in total metapodium of 80 sheep were used. Following maceration, 17 morphometrical and 3 stereological, totally 20 measurements were obtained from each metapodium. The average maximum length of metacarpus and metatarsus of the female Morkaraman sheep were determined as 137.98 mm and 146.99 mm, respectively. In the male Morkaraman sheep these values were found respectively as 132.76 mm and 142.21 mm, respectively. Besides, the average maximum length for the female and male metacarpus was determined as 133.15 and 133.80 mm respectively. Also, it was respectively found in their metatarsus as 143.87 ve 143.12 mm. Some statistically differences was investigated between metapodium in the analysis of gender and race. To sum up, it was detected that gender was more effective than race on metapodium morphometry of Morkaraman and Tuj sheep. Furthermore, it was uncovered that more bone marrow can be obtained from metapodium of female than metapodium of male Morkaraman and Tuj sheep.
Highly accurate simulation of the surface wind field over Ise Bay

Using the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University / National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) mesoscale model (MM5), we simulate the surface wind field over Ise Bay, which is located in the central part of Japan and faces the Pacific. The simulation is performed for the whole month of March, 2001, and its accuracy is validated with observations at a marine tower station located in the bay. As a result, we found that MM5 can reproduce the surface wind field over the bay with a high degree of accuracy. The bias and the root mean squared emor of the simulated wind speed are -0.5 m/s and 1.9 m/s, respectively. Limited to winds of more than 5 m/s, the root mean squared error in wind direction is 29.3°. We also found that the surface winds simulated by MM5 are more accurate than those obtained by other conventional methods based on observations of wind and pressure at onshore stations.
Does insurance affect health care utilisation if the health system is polarized? Evidence from a South African natural experiment

We formulate and test a hypothesis that insurance only affects health care utilisation in countries where the health care system is sufficiently polarized that there exists a dramatic gap in the quality and characteristics of the care that can be accessed with and without insurance cover. We investigate this hypothesis in the context of South Africa, where apartheid era policies left the country with a highly unequal society and a polarized health care system. In order to estimate the causal effect of health insurance, we exploit the exogenous variation in health insurance coverage induced by the implementation of the Government Employees Medical Scheme. Two sets of data are used to test firstly the effect of the initial implementation of this policy in 2007 and secondly the effect of the continued roll-out between 2008 and 2012. Our identification strategy uses aspects of difference-in-difference and instrumental variable estimators to identify the causal effect of health insurance on health seeking behaviour. The results indicate that health insurance has a large effect on utilisation amongst South Africans, and that this effect is mainly due to the increased usage of high quality medical services. This result is found to be highly robust to the choice of dataset, sample period, specification and estimator. Estimates of the marginal treatment effect confirm that there is a very high pent-up demand for quality health care in South Africa, and indicate that health insurance is higher amongst individuals who expect to gain more from this. Further extensions in access to health insurance should therefore eventually produce somewhat weaker health utilisation responses. JEL CODES: I11, I18, C31
Perceptual Evaluation of Binaural Auralization of Data Obtained from the Spatial Decomposition Method

We present a perceptual evaluation of head-tracked binaural renderings of room impulse response data that were obtained from the spatial decomposition method. These data comprise an omnidirectional impulse response as well as instantaneous propagation directions of the sound field. The subjects in our experiment compared auralizations of these data according to the originally proposed method against direct auralizations of dummy head measurements of the exact same scenarios. We tested various parameters such as size of the microphone array, number of microphones, and HRTF grid-resolution. Our study shows that most parameter sets lead to a perception that is very similar to the dummy head data particlarly with respect to spaciousness. The remaining differences that are audible are considered small and relate primarily to timbre. This suggests that the equalization procedure that is part of the approach provides potential for improvement. Our results also show that the elevation of the propagation directions may be quantized coarsely without audible impairment.
Intensity-Based Bayesian Framework for Image Reconstruction from Sparse Projection Data

This paper presents a Bayesian framework for iterative image reconstruction from projection data measured over a limited number of views. The classical Nyquist sampling rule yields the minimum number of projection views required for accurate reconstruction. However, challenges exist in many medical and industrial imaging applications in which the projection data is undersampled. Classical analytical reconstruction methods such as FBP are not a good choice for use in such cases because the data undersampling in the angular range introduces aliasing and streak artifacts that degrade lesion detectability. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian framework for ML-EM-based iterative reconstruction methods that incorporates a priori knowledge obtained from expected intensity information. The proposed framework is based on the fact that, in tomographic imaging, it is often possible to expect a set of intensity values of the reconstructed object with relatively high accuracy. The image reconstruction cost function is modified to include the norm distance to the a priori known information. The proposed method has the potential to regularize the solution to reduce artifacts without missing lesions that cannot be expected from the a priori information. Numerical studies showed a significant improvement in image quality and lesion detectability under the condition of highly undersampled projection data.
Aligning Conference Ontologies with SUMO: A Report on Manual Alignment via WordNet

This paper presents the process of manually establishing alignments between domain and foundational ontologies. The ontologies from the OAEI Conference track have been aligned to the SUMO foundational ontology. The Conference dataset is one of the most used dataset in ontology matching evaluation and has been extended in several versions. However, it lacks in alignments to foundational ontologies. As a complete manual alignment between SUMO and WordNet is available, we use such alignments as bridges to facilitate the matching task. In this paper we describe the constructing of such alignments and discuss the issues dealt with during the process, lessons learned and perspectives in the field.
J Turk Acad Dermatol 2016; 10 (1): 16101r1

Background: Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) is a proinflammatory cytokine that plays an immunomodulatory role in a variety of systemic and dermatologic disease. Its blockade can be achieved by using specific inhibitors like etanercept. At present, etanercept is approved for rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis and psoriasis treatment. However, it has been used with promising results in other inflammatory dermatoses. Etanercept treatment have been reported in the following dermatologic diseases: sarcoidosis, hidradenitis suppurativa, acne vulgaris, cicatricial pemphigoid, pemphigus vulgaris, Hailey-Hailey disease, Behçet’ s disease, oral aphthous stomatitis, pyoderma gangrenosum, multicentric reticulohistiocytosis, apthous stomatitis, Sneddon-Wilkinson disease, acrodermatitis continua of Hallopeau, SAPHO syndrome, pityriasis rubra pilaris, vitiligo, necrobiosis lipoidica, silicone granulomas, Sweet’s syndrome, atopic dermatitis, dyshidrotic eczema, toxic epidermal necrolysis, alopecia areata, centrifugal annular erythema, primary amyloidosis, erythroderma-related pruritus in Sézary syndrome, cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, inflammatory linear verrucous epidermal nevus, excessive scarring, postherpetic neuralgia, dermatomyositis, vasculitis, lupus erythematosus, and scleroderma. The vast majority of these reports are in the form of individual case reports and small case series. A growing number of published reports suggest that etanercept treatment may be effective in the treatment of numerous inflammatory skin disease outside their currently approved indications.
Dependency behaviour of Haskell libraries An extension to usage and switchback tendencies in a different project environment

Software developers face an enormous issue of upgrading or downgrading their library versions as the cost of migration is huge and can result in introduction of bugs into the project. In addition to the previously obtained Java usage trends, our research aims at studying the usage trends of Haskell libraries and determine if the popularity of a library is dependent on the programming language. We then extend our analysis to study the reason behind switching of different libraries by the developers. By analysing commit messages, we categorise upgrades and downgrades of library versions. Consequently, our research provides a technique to indicate which library version to use in
THE LINGUISTIC STATUS OF PROSODIC AND PARALINGUISTIC FEATURES

In 1964, D. L. Bolinger published a useful little article in the Harvard Educational Review, and gave it the partial title "Around the Edge of Language"; but his gloss for this, 'Intonation', implied a state of affairs which (in academic circles at any rate) was a few years behind the times. Those days are long gone, one trusts, when phenomena such as intonation and stress were deemed 'additions' to language proper-'super' fixes or 'supra' segmentals of marginal status and interest. Most linguists these days see intonational information, its form and function having been better defined, as relevant for the main part of any linguistic statement: it is no longer on the edge of language.l However, intonation has also been pushed further into the linguistic fold by default, as it were, for there has been a better contender for the title of 'linguistic phenomenon of most peripheral interest'. Over recent years, linguists and others have been studying a range of vocal effects (using largely linguistic techniques of analysis and description) whose uncertain status and definition are such as to make intonation appear quite safe as a clearly intralinguistic phenomenon. These effects, generally called 'paralinguistic phenomena' since Trager's first stimulating description of some of them,2 are now the focus of attention for a number of scholars, and their place within or without the discipline of linguistics is clearly something which merits detailed discussion. This paper, then, attempts to review some of the issues which are currently being discussed, and to ask some questions which seem relevant to determining the linguistic status of these phenomena.
Three-class Sentiment Analysis adapted to short texts

The demand for information on opinions and sentiment has seen an increase in recent years. This article adapts a general Sentiment Analysis scheme to deal with short texts and three classes of sentiment. It addresses positive, negative and neutral sentiments automatically using Feature Engineering and Text Classification techniques. The effectiveness of this scheme is evaluated using the Semeval 2007 dataset and it achieves maximum rate of 49%, improving by 7% the results reported in the state of the art following the same evaluation conditions.
RESEARCH REVIEW OF COGNTIVE RADIO

Cognitive radio(CR), which is one of the main development directions of future wireless communication, can effectively solve the problem of frequency spectrum shortage faced by wireless communication development. Several concepts about CR were introduced and analyzed at first. Then the key technology of realizing CR was presented. The paper mainly analyzed the research dynamic of CR. The problems which exist in the study or need further research were also presented. At last, it is pointed out that the research on CR is still in its infancy and we must do more work on studying CR to meet its realization.
Evolving constraints and rules in Harmonic Grammar

An evolutionary model of pattern learning in the MaxEnt OT/HG framework is described in which constraint induction and constraint weighting are consequences of reproduction with variation and differential ﬁtness. The model is shown ﬁt human data from published experiments on both unsupervised phonotactic (Moreton et al., 2017) and supervised visual (Nosofsky et al., 1994) pattern learning, and to account for the observed reversal in difﬁ-culty order of exclusive-or vs. gang-effect patterns between the two experiments. Different parameter settings are shown to yield gradual, parallel, connectionist and abrupt, serial, symbolic performance.
Widespread use of the “ascidian” mitochondrial genetic code in tunicates

Background Ascidians, a tunicate class, use a mitochondrial genetic code that is distinct from vertebrates and other invertebrates. Though it has been used to translate the coding sequences from other tunicate species on a case-by-case basis, it is has not been investigated whether this can be done systematically. This is an important because a) some tunicate mitochondrial sequences are currently translated with the invertebrate code by repositories such as NCBI’s GenBank, and b) uncertainties about the genetic code to use can complicate or introduce errors in phylogenetic studies based on translated mitochondrial protein sequences. Methods We collected publicly available nucleotide sequences for non-ascidian tunicates including appendicularians such as Oikopleura dioica, translated them using the ascidian mitochondrial code, and built multiple sequence alignments covering all tunicate classes. Results All tunicates studied here appear to translate AGR codons to glycine instead of serine (invertebrates) or as a stop codon (vertebrates), as initially described in ascidians. Among Oikopleuridae, we suggest further possible changes in the use of the ATA (Ile → Met) and TGA (Trp → Arg) codons. Conclusions We recommend using the ascidian mitochondrial code in automatic translation pipelines of mitochondrial sequences for all tunicates. Further investigation is required for additional species-specific differences.
Fourier Series Approach for the Vibration of Euler–Bernoulli Beam under Moving Distributed Force: Application to Train Gust

The dynamic response of an Euler–Bernoulli beam under moving distributed force is studied. By decomposing the distributed force into Fourier series and extending them to semi-infinite sine waves, the complex procedure for solving this problem is simplified to three base models, which are calculated by the modal superposition method further. The method is proved to be highly accurate and computational efficient by comparing with the finite element method. For verifying the theory and exploring the relationship between dynamic pressure due to train gust and vibration of the structure, a site test was conducted on a platform canopy located on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway in China. The results show the theory can be used to evaluate the dynamic response of the beam structure along the trackside due to the train gust. The dynamic behavior of a 4-span continuous steel purlin is studied when the structure is subjected to the moving pressure due to different high-speed train passing.
Climate Change and Infectious Diseases: Evidence from Highly Vulnerable Countries

Background: Climate change is an alarming challenge for humanity at large due to its mediating role in emergence and spread of infectious diseases like cholera and malaria. This study was conducted to examine the effect of climate change and some socio-economic factors on incidence of infectious diseases. Methods: We used country level panel data over the 1990–2017 period using panel ARDL-PMG technique on highly affected countries from climate change. Results: There is a long run co-integrating relationship among climate change, socio-economic factors and prevalence of infectious diseases. Climate change, as measured by the temperature, is contributing to the spread of infectious diseases. Conclusion: This is the first study giving evidence of the impact of climate change on incidence of infectious diseases as can be seen from highly vulnerable countries to climate change. It is recommended to improve the level of education along with public health and town planning to reduce the incidence of infectious diseases.