Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Zero Days, Thousands of Nights: The Life and Times of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities and Their Exploits

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. Preface There is an ongoing policy debate over whether the U.S. government—or any government—should retain so-called zero-day software vulnerabilities or disclose them so they can be patched. 1 Those who have knowledge of a zero-day vulnerability may create " exploits " —code that takes advantage of the vulnerability—to access other parts of a system, execute their own code, act as an administrator, or perform some other action, but many worry that keeping these vulnerabilities secret can expose people who use the vulnerable software to malware attacks and other attempts to collect their private information. Furthermore, cybersecurity and the liability that might result from attacks, hacks, and data breaches using zero-day vulnerabilities have substantial implications for U.S. consumers, companies, and insurers, and for the civil justice system broadly. The debate of whether to retain or disclose these vulnerabilities is often fueled by how much overlap there might be between the zero-day vulnerabilities or exploits the U.S. government keeps and those its adversaries are stockpiling. If both sides have the same stockpiles, then some argue that there is little point to keeping them private— whereas a smaller overlap might justify retention. But without information on the overlap , or concrete metrics based on actual data, it is challenging to make a well-informed decision about stockpiling. To address this question, RAND obtained rare access to a dataset of information about zero-day software vulnerabilities and exploits. In this report, we explore the dataset using novel applications of traditional statistical methods to reveal a number of insights about the industry and establish some initial metrics regarding the life status, longevity, and collision rates of …
AGGREGATE ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN PAKISTAN: An Application of Decomposition Approach

The paper examines the role of structural changes and improvement in energy efficiency of individual sectors in aggregate energy intensity changes in, Pakistan, during 1960-1998. Using a decomposition approach, this study attempts to provide insights into the changes in the structure of the economy and energy intensity that occurred in the economy, during the period under consideration. The estimation identifies and measures cyclical and trend components for both the structural and intensity indices. The cyclical component is being due to changes in output and the trend component is probably due to . changes in technology and consumer preferences.
Proactive Control of Emotional Distraction: Evidence From EEG Alpha Suppression

Biased attention towards emotional stimuli is adaptive, as it facilitates responses to important threats and rewards. An unfortunate consequence is that emotional stimuli can become potent distractors when they are irrelevant to current goals. How can this distraction be overcome despite the bias to attend to emotional stimuli? Recent studies show that distraction by irrelevant flankers is reduced when distractor frequency is high, even if they are emotional. A parsimonious explanation is that the expectation of frequent distractors promotes the use of proactive control, whereby attentional control settings can be altered to minimize distraction before it occurs. It is difficult, however, to infer proactive control on the basis of behavioral data alone. We therefore measured neural indices of proactive control while participants performed a target-detection task in which irrelevant peripheral distractors (either emotional or neutral) could appear either frequently (on 75% of trials) or rarely (on 25% of trials). We measured alpha power during the pre-stimulus period to assess proactive control and during the post-stimulus period to determine the consequences of control for subsequent processing. Pre-stimulus alpha power was tonically suppressed in the high, compared to low, distractor frequency condition, regardless of expected distractor valence, indicating sustained use of proactive control. In contrast, post-stimulus alpha suppression was reduced in the high-frequency condition, suggesting that proactive control reduced the need for post-stimulus adjustments. Our findings indicate that a sustained proactive control strategy accounts for the reduction in both emotional and non-emotional distraction when distractors are expected to appear frequently.
Finding Answers to Questions, in Text Collections or Web, in Open Domain or Specialty Domains

This chapter is dedicated to factual question answering, i.e. extracting precise and exact answers to question given in natural language from texts. A question in natural language gives more information than a bag of word query (i.e. a query made of a list of words), and provides clues for finding precise answers. We will first focus on the presentation of the underlying problems mainly due to the existence of linguistic variations between questions and their answerable pieces of texts for selecting relevant passages and extracting reliable answers. We will first present how to answer factual question in open domain. We will also present answering questions in specialty domain as it requires dealing with semi-structured knowledge and specialized terminologies, and can lead to different applications, as information management in corporations for example. Searching answers on the Web constitutes another application frame and introduces specificities linked to Web redundancy or collaborative usage. Besides, the Web is also multilingual, and a challenging problem consists in searching answers in target language documents other than the source language of the question. For all these topics, we present main approaches and the remaining problems.
Cash and Dash

Cash and Dash looks at the origins and development of the automated teller machine (ATM) as means to provide the unifying thread to explain changes in retail banking brought about by and around the introduction of computer technology. Main themes include an explanation of why technological change is slow in retail financial markets, and how different groups of people and organizations interact to shape a particular technology. Documentary evidence helps to clarify the myth of the single inventor and details the monumental task to deliver digital banking for retail consumers. Of particular importance for banks around the world throughout this task, was the need to balance new and unintended uses of a device by consumers as opposed to solving impending technical issues and gaining consumers’ trust, acceptance, and high usage. Research illuminates the progress of an industry-specific innovation becoming a novelty and how new payment devices embed in everyday life. The story in Cash and Dash also illustrates that serious ethical and political issues can emerge while adopting, making operational, and maintaining a particular technology within and around retail financial institutions. This approach contrasts with others that perceive technological change as external, neutral, and devoid of context and social setting. The book aims to keep the focus of the narrative off obsolescence and on maintenance and reinvention, while also allowing space to provide conceptual underpinnings and celebrating industry milestones. In short, Cash and Dash recounts a story of decisions about capital investments, business strategies, and technological evolution, and how these were followed by decisions dealing with legacy systems, personnel, standards, locations, and whether machines could become a source of competitive advantage in retail banking.
A DAG-based Sparse Cholesky Solver for Multicore Architectures

In this paper, we describe the design and development of a new code for the solution of sparse symmetric positive-definite linear systems aimed primarily at multicore architectures. Our new Fortran 95/OpenMP code, HSL MA87, is available as part of the software library HSL and extends to the sparse case the task DAG-based approach that is becoming popular in the design and development of dense linear algebra kernels. Comparisons are made with existing parallel solvers, using problems arising from a range of practical applications. We demonstrate that HSL MA87 obtains good serial and parallel times on an 8-core machine.
Euro Area Inflation Expectations

This study explores the recent dynamics of inflation expectations for the main euro area countries. It uses daily financial data for the main euro area countries over the past 15 years with a wide range of time horizons. The estimation of a model of the term structure of inflation expectations using these data allows the common part to be separated from the country specific part. It is found that, for the various time horizons and countries, the bulk of expected inflation is common to the whole euro area. The weight of country-specific factors is low, being most significant for the shorter term. For time horizons between five and ten years, the estimated inflation expectations showed a downward trend from 2012, which has reversed in the last two years owing to the application of a broad set of unconventional monetary policy measures in the euro area since mid-2014. Still, in the past year, medium-term inflation expectations have held below 2%, around 1.7% on average, clearly lower than in the period before the economic crisis.
Design of Software Fault Tolerance in the RTEMS Embedded System

Under some bad environments,embedded systems can work normally if software fault tolerant functions are provided.This can reduce the system overhead and increase the system's ability of fault tolerance without affecting the system efficiency.Aiming at the problem that the RTEMS real-time operating system lacks software fault tolerant functions at the system level,this paper presents an entire suite of schemes named two-level fault tolerance in order to improve the reliability of the system.
Nuclear vowel priming and anticipatory oral postures: evidence for parallel phonological planning?

ABSTRACT Linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of speech planning typically assume serial phonological encoding. However, under some neurally-inspired speech models, phonological elements are initially co-active in a parallel planning space. Research using acoustic reaction times has perhaps mistakenly attributed execution-level phonetic effects to serial encoding. We used motion-tracked digital video to measure lip posture. In two form-preparation experiments, participants were sometimes primed with the nuclear vowels of CVC words. All words contained either /i/ (spread lips; e.g. “seed”) or /u/ (rounded lips, e.g. “soup”). The initial consonants were uncertain. Analyses emphasised oral postures preceding stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, participants’ early postures anticipated the upcoming vowel when it was primed. Experiment 2 included two pairs of vowel-primed blocks. The words of one /i/-block began with rounded consonants. Primed vowels influenced anticipatory articulation except when superseded by conflicting demands from likely initial consonants. We discuss the implications for parallel encoding.
An Output Power Prediction Method for Multiple Wind Farms under Energy Internet Environment

Traditional wind power prediction is only applicable to a single wind farm. Aim at this isolated prediction method. In this paper, combing with the information sharing and Interconnection mechanism of energy Internet, we propose an output power prediction method for multiple wind farms based on DBPSO-LSSVM model. Firstly, collect SCADA data of multiple wind farms in different areas. Secondly, delete outliers of different farms based on DBSCAN algorithm and select multiple wind fields training samples. And searching the optimal input parameters of LSSVM based on particle swarm algorithm to construct every wind farm model. Thirdly, predict multiple wind fields power combined with numerical weather prediction system. The method we propose can be used to make the scheduling plan in advance to solve a large number of abandoned wind power rationing problem every year. In experiment, the method we propose has the lowest error rate compares to LSSVM and BP-neural network. It’s more suitable to predict wind fields in different areas.
Relation between millimeter wavelengths emission and high-energy emission for active galactic nuclei

After comparing the flux densities of a sample of active galactic nuclei detected by energetic gamma-ray experiment telescope at 90 and 230 GHz with the γ-ray emissions detected by Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory and x-ray emission, a strong correlation between the emission at the millimeter wavelength and the γ-ray emission is found. The average flux density of x-ray is almost proportional to the average flux density at the millimeter wavelength for quasars detected by energetic gamma-ray experiment telescope, which strongly supports the previous idea that the x-ray emissions of this kind sources are mainly produced by synchrotron self-Compton process.
Finite Element Mesh Division Based on Triangle Conjunction

Creatively proposed the finite element mesh division method based on triangle conjunction.However,the created triangles are not the basic units of the finite calculation.The created triangles will generate regular quadrilaterals.In the real projects,creatively put forwards three effective algorithms and use C++ object-oriented designing method and MFC framework to programme the algorithm.This programme can read boundary information,point restrain and line restrain datas from the model file.The programme will calculate a resonable boundary interval,and then select a division algorithm manually or automatically,thus complete the high-qualified quadrilateral mesh division.Three algorithms can deal large amount of point and line data,meanwhile,the division speed is highly effective.Finally,this programme module has been successfully applied to the finite element calculation software.
The Role of Macedonian Folk Songs Featured in Macedonian Films in Amplifying the Emotions

Macedonian folk songs, as a part of Macedonian traditions and culture, represent an integral part of Macedonian history marked by resistance, military feats, and tendencies for maintaining the Macedonian national identity. This paper is focused on the issue of whether two Macedonian folk songs With Torments I was Born and Listen Patriots created in the course of the 19 th century – a period marked with active struggle for liberation and independence of the Macedonian nation – additionally intensify the emotions provoked by the storyline and action of the films, in which they have been incorporated. During the research process, the authors of the paper used the mechanism of cognitive appraisal as a model for content analysis, as well as psychological and ethnomusicological analysis of the resulting data. The units of content analysis were the sequences of scenes of the film, in which the two Macedonian folk songs were used. The selected songs and films, as well as the interaction between the sound and visual senses, clearly present the deep relationship between music and emotions in a specific, identity-related context. The findings of the study are in favor of the thesis that Macedonian folk songs, created as a result of the centuries-old struggle of the Macedonian people, when used in Macedonian films, intensify the patriotic emotions of the viewers and strengthen the concept of uniqueness in the Macedonian identity, due to the processes of repetition and revitalization of collective memories.
The Effect of Liquidity, Administrative Efficiency and Capital Adequacy on the Profitability of Jordanian Banks listed on the Amman Stock Exchange

This study aimed to examine the impact of liquidity, administrative efficiency and capital adequacy on the profitability of Jordanian banks listed on the Amman stock exchange (AMS). The analytical descriptive approach was used to study the panel data method, and to rely on the random effect model. The variables of the study were liquidity, administrative efficiency and capital adequacy’s independent variables, and profitability as dependent variable. The sample of the study is all of the Jordanian commercial banks (JCB) listed on the AMS, which number thirteen. To achieve the objective of the study the annual data on the variables affecting the profitability of banks for the period (2010 to 2016) were analyzed. The study found the following results: there is a significant impact of liquidity, administrative efficiency and capital adequacy on the profitability of Jordanian banks listed at the AMS. There is a negative impact of liquidity on the profitability of Jordanian banks listed at the AMS. There is a positive impact of administrative efficiency on the profitability of Jordanian banks listed at the AMS. There is no impact of capital adequacy on the profitability of Jordanian banks listed at the AMS.
Learning for Cross-layer Resource Allocation in the Framework of Cognitive Wireless Networks

LEARNING FOR CROSS-LAYER RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN THE FRAMEWORK OF COGNITIVE WIRELESS NETWORKS Author: Wenbo Wang Supervisor: Andres Kwasinski, Ph.D. Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, 2016 The framework of cognitive wireless networks is expected to endow wireless devices with a cognition-intelligence ability with which they can efficiently learn and respond to the dynamic wireless environment. In this dissertation, we focus on the problem of developing cognitive network control mechanisms without knowing in advance an accurate network model. We study a series of cross-layer resource allocation problems in cognitive wireless networks. Based on model-free learning, optimization and game theory, we propose a framework of self-organized, adaptive strategy learning for wireless devices to (implicitly) build the understanding of the network dynamics through trial-and-error. The work of this dissertation is divided into three parts. In the first part, we investigate a distributed, single-agent decision-making problem for real-time video streaming over a time-varying wireless channel between a single pair of transmitter and receiver. By modeling the joint source-channel resource allocation process for video streaming as a constrained Markov decision process, we propose a reinforcement learning scheme to search for the optimal transmission policy without the need to know in advance the details of network dynamics.
Group-oriented beamforming for multi-stream multicasting based on quality-of-service requirements

We address the problem of multi-stream multicasting, where independent data streams are transmitted from a multi-antenna transmitter to several groups of independent single-antenna receivers. Multi-antenna multicasting allows forming spatial beams. By properly shaping the beam patterns, intergroup interference can be avoided and the SINR at all receivers can be jointly controlled. In addition, we assume that dirty paper preceding (DPC) is employed at the transmitter to further reduce the interference. We first consider the problem of minimizing the total power subject to individual SINR constraints. We propose a near-optimal algorithm based on semidefinite relaxation, combined with optimal power allocation. We also derive a low-complexity algorithm, which shows good performance in the low-SNR regime. Then, we consider the problem of maximizing the worst-case SINR subject to a total power constraint. We propose a near-optimal solution based on a bisection strategy
The Sandford Orleigh overmantle: a 19th-century Tudor puzzle

SUMMARY: In the 1830s a colourful Devon landowner and industrialist, George Templer, had a new house built for himself at Sandford Orleigh, on the outskirts of Newton Abbot, Devon. One of the principal rooms within was furnished with an imposing overmantle that was created from his collection of antique oak carvings. The overmantle, much neglected, was donated to the local museum in 2008, whereupon a conservation and research project exploring it was launched. This resulted in the discovery that at the heart of this piece lay a Tudor-period reredos, created in the then-fashionable Renaissance style: all’antica. The style of work seen in this overmantle compares closely to a screen in nearby Bradley manor and the south door of Totnes church.
Detection of Performance Anomalies in Cloud Services: A Correlation Analysis Approach

The prevalence of ubiquitous computing and communication has coined the term of cloud computing through which, software, infrastructure and platform can be provided as a service. Software as a service (SaaS) is getting an increasing potential as a cloud-based option for using software applications in a payper-use manner. A critical challenge in SaaS model is continuous attestation of the compliance with quality of service (QoS) metrics stated in SLAs. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting performance anomalies in cloud software services. The proposed method uses correlation analysis between computing resources utilization and workload characteristics. This is done by comparing the correlation values to a reference load test values performed before the SaaS deployment to identify deviations and notify the system administrator about it. The testing scenario operates in two steps. First, running a standard benchmark on a virtual machine to simulate workload and record the correlation between workload and available computing resources utilization (i.e., CPU, RAM, HDD, and Network). Second, the same benchmark is executed again but with changing the workload characteristics through injecting additional queries or changing the computing resources configuration values of the virtual machine. The changes are only present on specific time points to testify the detection rate. Results on standard benchmarks TPC-C, TPC-D and TPC-W showed a promising detection rate that can assure SLA targeted quality aspects such as reliability, scalability and security.
The impact of international football events on local, national and transnational fan cultures: a critical overview

With the men’s World Cup becoming a distant memory and the Club competitions in full swing, it’s convenient to think that these competitions are distinct and separate. As the World Cup moves across the globe under the jurisdiction of FIFA, it does not operate in a vacuum. Club competitions may operate in fairly stable local, national and regional leagues and cups, but many of their fans also support national teams. The opportunities for fans to meet, share ideas and put ideas they’ve implemented at club level into the international arena are manifest. Media images are replete with fans socialising in fan embassies, or engaging in hooliganism. In this way, localised aspects of fan culture can enter the international arena. Yet the impact on fans is not restricted to club fans influencing the support of national teams. Ideas, laws and redevelopments introduced in international competition can significantly impact how Club fans maintain their supporter culture, as this special issue will highlight.