Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INVESTIGATION OF THE PERFORMANCE OF CONTENT-BASED OPPORTUNISTIC ROUTING PROTOCOL IN DTN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is one kind of emerging networks characterized by long delay and intermittent connectivity. Therefore, network environments where the nodes are characterized by opportunistic connectivity are appropriately modeled as Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN). Traditional ad hoc routing protocols are inapplicable in DTNs because nodes are seldom fully connected. In recent years, many routing protocols are proposed to improve the performance matrix in DTN. In this paper, we have observed the performance of social aware DTN routing protocols, namely Social-aware Contentbased Opportunistic Routing Protocol (SCORP), Daily Routine Based (dLife), and Community Based dLife (dLifeComm) in an ICMN scenario. Their performances are analyzed in terms of delivery probability, average latency, and overhead ratio for varying the number of nodes per group, TTL (time to live) and simulation time respectively. Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator is used as the simulation tool for evaluating these performance metrics. The result of this investigation shows that for the ICMN scenario, SCORP exhibits best performance whereas dLife the worst in terms of all the metrics considered here.
Anti-Inflammatory Effects of Shenfu Injection against Acute Lung Injury through Inhibiting HMGB1-NF-κB Pathway in a Rat Model of Endotoxin Shock

Shenfu injection (SFI), a Chinese herbal medicine with substances extracted from Ginseng Radix et Rhizoma Rubra and Aconiti Lateralis Radix Praeparata, is widely used as an anti-inflammatory reagent to treat endotoxin shock in China. However, the mechanism of SFI in endotoxin shock remains to be illuminated. High mobility group box 1 (HMGB1), a vital inflammatory factor in the late stage of endotoxin shock, may stimulate multiple signalling cascades, including κB (NF-κB), a nuclear transcription factor, as well as tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α and interleukin (IL)-1β, among others in the overexpression of downstream proinflammatory cytokines. An investigation into the effects of SFI on the inhibition of the HMGB1-NF-κB pathway revealed the contribution of SFI to acute lung injury (ALI) in a rat model of endotoxin shock. To assess the anti-inflammatory activity of SFI, 5 ml/kg, 10 ml/kg, or 15 ml/kg of SFI was administered to different groups of rats following an injection of LPS, and the mean arterial pressure (MAP) at 5 h and the survival rate at 72 h were measured. 24 h after LPS injection, we observed pathological changes in the lung tissue and measured the mRNA expression, production, translocation, and secretion of HMGB1, as well as the expression of the NF-κB signal pathway-related proteins inhibitor of NF-κB (IκB)-α, P50, and P65. We also evaluated the regulation of SFI on the secretion of inflammatory factors including interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β) and TNF-α. SFI effectively prevented the drop in MAP, relieved lung tissue damage, and increased the survival rate in the endotoxin shock model in dose-dependent manner. SFI inhibited the transcription, expression, translocation, and secretion of HMGB1, increased the expression of toll-like receptor (TLR4), increased the production of IκB-α, and decreased the levels of P65, P50, and TNF-α in the lung tissue of endotoxin shock rats in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, SFI decreased the secretion of proinflammatory cytokines TNF-α and IL-1β. In summary, SFI improves the survival rate of endotoxin shock, perhaps through inhibiting the HMGB1-NF-κB pathway and thus preventing cytokine storm.
Performance Evaluation and Comparison of Software Defined Networks Controllers

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network architecture, the controller which is one of its components represents the intelligent part of it. Today, there exists many SDN controllers including: Beacon, Floodlight, Iris, Libfluid, Maestro, NOX, ONOS, and others. The question is which controller can perform better in which situations. Several works were done to compare these controllers with respect to efficiency, controllers’ features, and architecture. Because of the controller importance in the SDN architecture, it should be given a proper attention to any proposal or design. In this paper, a Performance evaluation test of five controllers (libfluid, ONOS, OpenDaylight, POX and Ryu) is done in terms of End to End throughput and End to End delay by using Iperf and Ping commands. The test is done using linear topology that is built in Mininet emulator, with different number of switches. This paper introduces a new contribution in measuring the ability of the five controllers to give a throughput and delay responses while increasing the load on the linear topology and at what point of network load (number of switches) the controllers stop responding. Even though the results show that libfluid gives the best throughput performance and POX gives the best delay performance, the selection of the best performing controller should be based on several criteria, per the user requirements. Keywords— Libfluid, Mininet, ONOS, OpenDaylight, POX, Ryu, Software Defined Networking (SDN).
oo7: Low-Overhead Defense Against Spectre Attacks via Program Analysis

The Spectre vulnerability in modern processors has been widely reported. The key insight in this vulnerability is that speculative execution in processors can be misused to access the secrets. Subsequently, even though the speculatively executed instructions are squashed, the secret may linger in micro-architectural states such as cache, and can potentially be accessed by an attacker via side channels. In this paper, we propose oo7, a static analysis approach that can mitigate Spectre attacks by detecting potentially vulnerable code snippets in program binaries and protecting them against the attack by patching them. Our key contribution is to balance the concerns of effectiveness, analysis time and run-time overheads. We employ control flow extraction, taint analysis, and address analysis to detect tainted conditional branches and speculative memory accesses. oo7 can detect all fifteen purpose-built Spectre-vulnerable code patterns [1] , whereas Microsoft compiler with Spectre mitigation option can only detect two of them. We also report the results of a large-scale study on applying oo7 to over 500 program binaries (average binary size 261 KB) from different real-world projects. We protect programs against Spectre attack by selectively inserting fences only at vulnerable conditional branches to prevent speculative execution. Our approach is experimentally observed to incur around 5.9 percent performance overheads on SPECint benchmarks.
SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON THE TRANSITION FROM UNICELLULAR TO MULTICELLULAR LIFE

The transition from unicellular to multicellular life is estimated to have occurred dozens of times in the history of evolution. This paper discusses the results of two recent investigations: Prochnic’s investigation (2010) on Chlamydomonas and Volvox and Anderson’s et al. investigation (2016) on the molecular phylogeny of GKPID , which show that the transition from unicellular to multicellular state did not require major genetic restructuring. At times even point mutations resulted in important consequences for the function of some proteins in living organisms. Other molecular mechanisms that contributed to the evolution and the complexity of the living world are also being discussed.
A Self-Training Framework for Automatic Identification of Exploratory Dialogue

The dramatic increase in online learning materials over the last decade has made it difﬁcult for individuals to locate information they need. Until now, researchers in the ﬁeld of Learning Analytics have had to rely on the use of manual approaches to identify exploratory dialogue. This type of dialogue is desirable in online learning environments, since training learners to use it has been shown to improve learning outcomes. In this paper, we frame the problem of exploratory dialogue detection as a binary classiﬁcation task, classifying a given contribution to an online dialogue as exploratory or non-exploratory. We propose a self-training framework to identify exploratory dialogue. This framework combines cue-phrase matching and K-nearest neighbour (KNN) based instance selection, employing both discourse and topical features for classiﬁcation. To do this, we ﬁrst built a corpus from transcripts of synchronous online chat recorded at The Open University annual Learning and Technology Conference in June 2010. Experimental results from this corpus show that our proposed framework outperforms several competitive baselines.
Limitations of two-port analysis of negative feedback circuits

Two-port (TP) analysis is widely used in the study of negative-feedback circuits. This type of analysis requires that we first identify which of the four topologies the circuit at hand belongs to (seriesshunt, shunt-series, series-series, or shunt-shunt), and then that we suitably modify the basic amplifier so as to account for loading by the feedback network [1]. Textbooks do specify that TP analysis postulates certain approximations so that its results are not necessarily exact. However, not many textbooks dwell further into this issue by showing actual examples [2] for which TP analysis is insufficient, if not utterly inadequate; so, after becoming proficient in TP analysis, one may erroneously be tempted to take its results as exact. Let us illustrate using the voltage follower of Figure 1 as a vehicle.
Estimating differential expression of transcripts with RNA-seq by using Bayesian Inference

I High-throughput sequencing produces millions of short reads originating from the molecules being sequenced. In case of RNA-seq we are mostly interested in mRNA molecules and the resolution of this method enables expression analysis at the level of individual transcripts. However, this task requires the use of probabilistic methods due to reads mapping to multiple transcripts. Figure: Example of alternative splicing of a gene producing two mRNAs. Only reads originating from the middle exon will enable separation of the expression levels.
Defending the Bank with a Static Analysis ⋆

The Common Crypto Arichitecture (CCA) deﬁnes the behavior of a small cryptographic device used in every automated teller machine (ATM). The CCA is meant to guarantee the conﬁdentiality of the keys used internally by the device, while allowing common ATM operations to be performed. Some versions of the CCA were found to be vulnerable. An amended version was manually proved secure in [8], posing the question of whether fully automatic tools are up to the task. Here, we report about the automatic veriﬁcation of the same fact.
Particle System Dynamics Software for the Design of Constructional Composites

Particle system dynamics is one of the most general simulation methods. Different terms are used for denoting this method: “many body problem”, “molecular dynamics” and others. The underlying algorithms of the particle system dynamics are currently implemented in many software packages, including packages specifically targeted to the parallel computational environments. However, the cases can be encountered in the constructional material science when force fields are quite complex and are hard to represent within existing software. In this work we have made the overview of the modeling tools available for the numerical solution of tasks in material science; the overview is based on the current theory and production technology of building materials. Two open source molecular dynamics software packages are examined; common features of such packages are outlined. Then we describe our implementation which is tailored for the specific tasks of the constructional material science.
Basic Digital Modulator Theory

To understand digital modulators it may be insightful to first review some of the basic concepts of signals. With a basic understanding of signals, the concept of baseband and bandpass signals can be addressed. Which then leads to the concept of modulation in continuous time (the analog world). Once continuous time modulation is understood, the step to digital modulation is relatively simple. Signals The variety of signal types and classes is broad and a discussion of all of them is not necessary to understand the concepts of digital modulation. However, one class of signals is very important: periodic complex exponentials . Periodic complex exponentials have the form: x(t) = β(t)e
Three-dimensional structure investigation of Waterborne Paint by Electron Microscopic Imaging

In this paper, the three-dimensional (3D) spatial structure of a TiO2 coated waterborne paint film has been successfully investigated by serial block-face scanning electron microscopy (SBFSEM). The investigation clearly shows the spatial distribution of the TiO2 particles in the paint film and illustrates the degree of dispersion of the particles in the composite material. More than 58% of the volume of the TiO2 particles are between 1.0 × 10 nm to 1.0× 10 nm and the minimum distance between different particles can be detected is 124 nm. Different types of voids can be found in the 3D image of the cured water-borne paint film: voids that exist in the paint itself, voids produced by particle shedding, water evaporating and particles stacking. Among these voids, the ones produced by particle shedding is a cutting artefact. The research provides a different approach to clearly present the 3D spatial structure of paints and can clearly illustrate different kinds of voids inside the water-borne paint. While the resulting 3D structure of the paint, especially the different voids are important for further systematic research on the relationships between the spatial microstructure and the physical and chemical properties of the water-borne paint.
Incidence and major metabolic risk factors of metabolic syndrome in type 2 diabetic out-patients visiting Tamale Teaching Hospital in Ghana

The study involved 300 (92 males and 208 females) type 2 diabetic patients and was conducted at the Tamale Teaching/Regional Hospital from June 2006 to May 2007. Metabolic syndrome was diagnosed using the National Cholesterol Education Programme, Adult Treatment Panel III (2001) criteria. The incidence of the metabolic syndrome was 60.3 per cent in the 300 type 2 diabetic out-patients, 11.0 per cent of whom were males and 49.3 per cent females. The incidence of central obesity and hypertension was 69.6 per cent, low HDL cholesterol 58.6 per cent and hypertriglyceridaemia 56.4 per cent in the patients. The metabolic syndrome is a common finding in type 2 diabetic out-patients visiting Tamale Teaching Hospital in Ghana, especially female type 2 diabetic out-patients. Central obesity and hypertension, the major metabolic risk factors of the metabolic syndrome, should be selectively targeted for treatment and prevention of the metabolic syndrome, and, hence. for prevention of cardiovascular disease in type 2 diabetic out-patients visiting Tamale Teaching Hospital in Ghana.
Online Appendix to Mechanism Design with News Utility

The online appendix is organized as follows. In section 1 we show how one can use Euler-Lagrange equations to find a solution of the optimal screening mechanism in timeline C whenever a weak condition which implies no ironing is satisfied. In section 2 we show that the classical revelation principle holds true in our multi-agent model. In section 3 we prove that for timeline B of the multi-agent model of the main paper optimal mechanisms are all-pay and also show that this result as well as virtually all our results from the main paper remain intact when the outside option of the agents is non-degenerate in the money dimension. Finally, section 4 registers several additional applications of the multi-agent model of the main paper: we prove that the classical impossibility results for ex-post efficiency in bilateral trade and public good provision remain intact in our setting for timeline A; we also characterize optimal auctions for asymmetric bidders in the case of timeline A as well as for symmetric bidders in timeline B.
Closed-form solution of linear buckling for tapered tubular columns with constant thickness

In this paper an approximate analytical solution of linear buckling for tapered column with tubular cross section is presented. The thickness is constant along the column. The solution is derived in terms of Bessel functions. Numerical analysis are performed to validate the effectiveness of the solutions. It is shown that the presented approach can be used for buckling problems of any non-uniform columns provided that flexural stiffness is a strictly monotonic function. In Appendix the algorithm of numerical analysis is presented.
Efficient Biometric Watermark Embedding by Flipping on Binary Text Documents

In respect to the issues on privacy, security and legal significance of a document, some sorts of security protections should be put on a document to ensure its genuineness and integrity. In this paper, signatories’ encrypted digital biometric fingerprint in binary format will be embedded into a binary text document by Flipping – one of the methods in spatial domain. During the embedding process, document will be adaptively partitioned into blocks with fixed size of pixels according to the number of bits in the watermark message. Each watermark bit is embedded into each block by Flipping. Based on the odd or even number of pixels in each block on the embedded document, the fingerprint watermark message is extracted after decryption. Experimental results from our prototype system show that the proposed method is successfully tested for embedding and extracting a fingerprint watermark message in a document no matter it is written in hieroglyph or in alphabetic character. Keywords— Biometric fingerprint, spatial domain, watermark message, decryption, hieroglyph.
The effect of a functional exercise programme following total hip replacement on the relaxed posterior gluteus medius thickness as measured by real-time ultrasound: A pilot randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Prolonged physical impairments are often reported post total hip replacement (THR). It is unclear which exercises should be performed to maximise rehabilitation following surgery. PURPOSE: The aim of this pilot study was to describe a method of imaging the relaxed posterior gluteus medius muscle in patients following surgery, and to measure the secondary outcome of relaxed muscle thickness of the posterior gluteus medius on the side of their THR following a rehabilitation intervention in this patient group. METHOD: This was a randomised controlled pilot study investigating the effect of functional exercise on the relaxed muscle thickness of the posterior gluteus medius as measured by real-time ultrasound. 57 patients were randomised to either a functional exercise class or usual care group. Real time ultrasound scanning of the posterior gluteus medius muscle were undertaken in both groups at baseline (week 12) and post intervention (week 18). RESULTS: There was no significant difference found in the size of the posterior gluteus medius between the intervention and control groups over the six week period of intervention. There was a statistically significant increase in the size of the posterior gluteus medius muscle at three points with a mean difference of 0.78 (95% CI 0.53–1.03), 1.05 (95% CI 0.67–1.43), 1.01 (95% CI 0.56–1.5) on the operated side in both groups over the six week period (p < 0.000). CONCLUSION: The thickness of the posterior gluteus medius on the operated side increased over a six week period from week 12 to week 18 post THR. There was no difference found in the thickness of the posterior gluteus medius in those attending a functional exercise class twice weekly and those receiving usual care.
Aircraft trajectory optimization during descent using a kriging-model-based-genetic algorithm

A time-series flight trajectory technique was developed for use in a civil aircraft during descent. The three-degree-of-freedom (3-DoF) equations of motion were solved via time-series prediction of aerodynamic forces. In the present evaluation, the microburst effect during the descent was considered. The single-objective optimization problem, in which the cost function indicating the trajectory efficiency was minimized, was solved by means of a Kriging model based genetic algorithm (GA) which produces an efficient global optimization process. The optimal trajectory results were compared with those without the microburst condition during the descent. The minimization solution converged well in each case for both conditions plus the differences in flight profiles based on the trajectory history were smaller than those of the solutions before optimization. An analysis of variance and parallel coordinate plot were applied to acquire the quantitative information for the initial condition of descend. The results revealed that the aerodynamic control factors, such as elevators angle and angles of attack, were effective for the minimization of the cost function when microburst is in effective range. According to the visualization results, it was found that a higher airspeed and a larger aerodynamic control by initial elevator were effective for minimizing the cost function when microburst has appeared. It shows that the developed model produced efficient global optimization and can evaluate the aircraft trajectory under the descent situation successfully.
THE CLASSIFICATION OF MINIMAL PRODUCT-QUOTIENT SURFACES WITH pg = 0

The present article is the fourth in a series of papers (cf. [BC04], [BCG08], [BCGP08]), where the goal is to contribute to the classification problem of surfaces of general type by giving a systematic way to construct and distinguish algebraic surfaces. We will use the basic notations from the classification theory of complex projective surfaces, in particular the basic numerical invariants K S, pg := h (S, ΩS), q(S) := h(S,OS); the reader unfamiliar with these may consult e.g. [Be83]. The methods we introduced in the above cited articles, and substantially develop and refine in the present paper are in principle applicable to many more situations. Still we restrict ourselves to the case of surfaces of general type with geometric genus pg = 0. It is nowadays well known that minimal surfaces of general type with pg = 0 yield a finite number of irreducible components of the moduli space of surfaces of general type. Although it is theoretically possible to describe all irreducible components of the moduli space corresponding to surfaces of general type with pg = 0, this ultimate goal is far out of reach, even if there has been a substantial progress in the study of these surfaces especially in the last five years. We refer to to [BCGP08] and [BCP10] for a historical account and recent update on what is known about surfaces of general type with pg = 0. We study the following situation: let G be a finite group acting on two compact Riemann surfaces C1, C2 of respective genera at least 2. We shall consider the diagonal action of G on C1 ×C2 and in this situation we say for short: the action
Stroke-by-Stroke Glyph Animation

We present a technique for automatic generation of animations of font glyphs for video text effects and kinetic typography. Each glyph is animated as a sequence of strokes, imitating drawing the glyph with a pen. Starting with an annotated stroke skeleton for each letter, our algorithm automatically computes animations for corresponding glyphs for a broad variety of fonts. Our algorithm imposes few constraints on font style, and can handle fonts with complex and unusual outline shape and topology. The technique also has applications to embroidery and mosaics.