Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INFAS: In-Network Flow mAnagement Scheme for SDN Control Plane Protection

The work that we present in this paper is motivated by a systematic vulnerability of SDN, a current technology that is expected to dominate the Internet. In particular, we focus on the Control Plane Saturation (CPS) attack, a very harmful, yet easy to implement, DoS attack. In CPS, the adversary generates a massive amount of flow packets that will not match switches’ flow rules. As a result, the switches flood the control channels and the controller with malicious control packets. Previously proposed solutions mainly rely on the controller-side detection and filtering, thus still consume the control plane bandwidth resources and cannot achieve quick response due to the switch-controller delay.We present INFAS, a system that runs on commodity servers installed near network devices, for protecting SDN against CPS. The switches send flow packets that do not match concrete flow rules in their flow tables to INFAS, which is tasked to analyze the packets and to subsequently decide on sending them back to the switches or not. This results in reducing the number of generated control packets by up to 80%, which we show through extensive evaluations.
Acquisition and management of field inspection data using augmented reality

Health monitoring of infrastructure systems is an important issue for public safety. Over the past decade, more structures are exhibiting signs of distress and the owners are required to perform periodic assessments of their assets. Visual inspection is the first approach employed for the assessment of a structure. The monitoring of distress evolution over time can serve as an estimator of a structure's structural performance. However, the data obtained during inspections are complex and hard to visualize on-site. Only after careful review of acquired data, the inspector can assess the condition of a structural component. The processing of field data may take several weeks before it yields any meaningful insight about the health of the structure. The procedure presented in this paper attempts to bridge this gap between the advancements of computer vision and on-site structure health monitoring, based on the utilization of Augmented Reality (AR) tools. More specifically, it includes the projection of holograms that present the reinforcement information obtained during structural inspections, data about the structural condition of the component, and 3D models including as-built details. The inspector can interact with the holograms using hand gestures. The holographic reinforcement visualization eliminates the time required to make a first assessment of a structure. Moreover, it increases efficiency and makes the inspection procedure safer, since the inspector doesn't have to carry any special equipment other than the holographic headset. Conventional approaches for the visual assessment of infrastructure systems are subjective, time consuming, and expensive to perform. Such AR systems can potentially decrease the time and cost of infrastructure inspections, by reducing the time required for post-processing and allowing the inspector to make educated estimations about the health of the structure in the field.
Quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) in Scotland: promoting self‐evaluation within and beyond the country

This article looks at policy for quality assurance and evaluation in Scotland, its history and more recent developments, and in particular, at the emphasis on school self‐evaluation. It examines the history of the concept, its constituent elements and the role of the Inspectorate in establishing it. Further, the article discusses the Scottish self‐evaluation model as a means of promoting the country’s distinctive identity in education within a European frame. It discusses the role of the Standing International Conference of Inspectorates as a major forum for the transmission of ideas about self‐evaluation that illuminates the role of networks in promoting Europeanisation.
The Role of Religious Orientation in Worldview Conflict

ABSTRACT Worldview conflict is a regular part of life. We typically encounter information that disagrees with or disconfirms the way we understand and make sense of the world. People usually respond negatively to such experiences; however, do responses depend, in part, on people’s individual religious beliefs or orientations? We tested whether religious orientation (i.e., intrinsic, quest, religious fundamentalism) and religious involvement moderated the effects of worldview disagreement. Employing an experience sampling design, participants (N = 328) from three institutions across two countries completed responses five times per day for three days. They indicated whether or not they had experienced any religious or political worldview disagreement and completed indicators of their emotional responses, well-being, and humanity-esteem. Results indicated that across most indicators, religious orientation does not moderate the effects of worldview disagreement. Rather, regardless of religious orientation, people responded similarly. We discuss implications and suggestions for future research.
Analyzing Game-Based Collaborative Problem Solving with Computational Psychometrics

This paper describes a psychometrically-based approach to mining and classifying behavioral data both in real-time and in post-game analyses. The data were collected from a sample of middle school children who interacted with a game-like, online simulation of collaborative problem solving tasks. In this simulation, a user is required to collaborate with a virtual agent to solve a series of tasks within a first-person maze environment. The tasks were developed following the psychometric principles of Evidence Centered Design (ECD) and are aligned with the Holistic Framework developed by ACT. The analyses presented in this paper are an application of an emerging discipline called computational psychometrics which is growing out of traditional psychometrics and incorporates techniques from educational data mining, machine learning and other computer/cognitive science fields. In the real-time analysis, our aim was to start with limited knowledge of skill mastery and then demonstrate a form of continuous Bayesian evidence tracing that updates sub-skill level probabilities as new conversation flow event evidence is presented. This is performed using Bayes’ rule and conversation item conditional probability tables. The items are polytomous and each response option has been tagged with a skill at a performance level. In our post-game analysis, our goal was to discover unique gameplay profiles by performing a cluster analysis of user’s sub-skill performance scores based on their patterns of selected dialog responses.
UK tourism arrivals and departures: seasonality, persistence and time trends

ABSTRACT Issues such as seasonality, persistence and trends are examined in the series referring to the number of UK arrivals and departures using techniques based on fractional integration. This methodology is much more flexible than others based on integer degrees of differentiation and permits us to describe in a more general way the effects of shocks in the series. Our results indicate that the series display significant time trends; they show high persistence with orders of integration in the fractional range, thus showing long-lasting effects of shocks; seasonality is an important issue, and in removing the seasonality through seasonal differentiation, the time trends disappear though persistence remains as a relevant feature of the data. Policy implications of the results obtained are displayed at the end of the article.
'O Youth and Beauty:' Children's Looks and Children's Cognitive Development

We use data from the 11 waves of the U.S. Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development 1991-2005, following children from ages 6 months through 15 years. Observers rated videos of them, obtaining measures of looks at each age. Given their family income, parents' education, race/ethnicity and gender, being better-looking raised subsequent changes in measurements of objective learning outcomes. The gains imply a long-run impact on cognitive achievement of about 0.04 standard deviations per standard deviation of differences in looks. Similar estimates on changes in reading and arithmetic scores at ages 7, 11 and 16 in the U.K. National Child Development Survey 1958 cohort show larger effects. The extra gains persist when instrumenting children's looks by their mother's, and do not work through teachers' differential treatment of better-looking children, any relation between looks and a child's behavior, his/her victimization by bullies or self-confidence. Results from both data sets show that a substantial part of the economic returns to beauty result indirectly from its effects on educational attainment. A person whose looks are one standard deviation above average attains 0.4 years more schooling than an otherwise identical average-looking individual.
International Monetary Fund From the SelectedWorks of Alberto Behar 2010 Distance to market and sub-Saharan African exports

A typical person in sub-Saharan Africa is a long way from world markets and is further from world markets now than in 1980. This partly reflects slower growth within Africa than for the world as a whole. Despite slower growth in Africa, African exports have become increasingly regionalized. By 2005, a country in Africa typically exported more than twice as much to a country in its own region as would be expected based on economic size and bilateral distance. This regionalization was not present in the early 1980s and has become stronger over time. We find evidence of positive neighbourhood effects through exports, but sub-Saharan countries benefit less from growth in their own region than this typical relationship indicates. Given the small share of exports destined to their neighbours, low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa experience relatively modest export growth from growth in the region. These factors imply that African countries are unlikely to pull each other out of poverty and a regional focus may be less effective than a focus on countries outside of the region.  Corresponding author. Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Economics Department and Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, tel: + 44 7817099883, fax + 44 185 271094, alberto.behar@economics.ox. ac.uk. + The Centre for International Economics, Sydney
Disappearing climates will limit the efficacy of Amazonian protected areas

Amazonian forests support high biodiversity and provide valuable ecosystem services. Unfortunately, these forests are under extreme pressure from land use change and other anthropogenic disturbances. A recent study combined data from an Amazon‐wide network of forest inventory plots with spatially explicit deforestation models to predict that by 2050, 36% or 57% of species will be ‘globally threatened’, as defined by IUCN Red List criteria, due to deforestation under Increased‐Governance or Business‐As‐Usual scenarios, respectively. It was also predicted that the number of threatened species will drop by 29–44% if no deforestation occurs within protected areas. However, even the best‐protected areas of the Amazon may still be susceptible to the effects of climate change and rising temperatures. To illustrate the potential dangers of climate change for Amazonian parks, we calculated the percentage of land area within all officially designated protected areas of tropical South America that will or will not have future temperature analogs under various scenarios of temperature change and park connectivity. We show that depending on the rate of warming and degree of connectivity, about 19–67% of protected areas will not have any temperature analogs in the near future (2050s). These results help to emphasize that protected areas are not immune to the effects of climate change and that large portions of Amazonian protected areas include ‘disappearing climates’. In the face of these disappearing climates, the biggest determinant of many species’ extinction risks may be their ability to migrate through non‐protected habitats.
A Hierarchical Convolution Neural Network (CNN)-Based Ship Target Detection Method in Spaceborne SAR Imagery

The ghost phenomenon in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is primarily caused by azimuth or range ambiguities, which cause difficulties in SAR target detection application. To mitigate this influence, we propose a ship target detection method in spaceborne SAR imagery, using a hierarchical convolutional neural network (H-CNN). Based on the nature of ghost replicas and typical target classes, a two-stage CNN model is built to detect ship targets against sea clutter and the ghost. First, regions of interest (ROIs) were extracted from a large imaged scene during the coarse-detection stage. Unwanted ghost replicas represented major residual interference sources in ROIs, therefore, the other CNN process was executed during the fine-detection stage. Finally, comparative experiments and analyses, using Sentinel-1 SAR data and various assessment criteria, were conducted to validate H-CNN. Our results showed that the proposed method can outperform the conventional constant false-alarm rate technique and CNN-based models.
SPINAL DUMBBELL EPIDURAL HEMANGIOMA: TWO STAGE/SAME SITTING/SAME POSITION POSTERIOR MICROSURGICAL AND TRANSTHORACIC ENDOSCOPIC RESECTION – CASE REPORT AND REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

SUMMARY – Spinal dumbbell tumors are defined by a narrowing at the point where they penetrate the intervertebral foramina or dura mater, assuming an hourglass or dumbbell shape. Dumbbell-shaped spinal hemangiomas are extremely rare. We describe a dumbbell spinal tumor (epidural cavernous hemangioma) resected by a 2-stage single-sitting combined approach. We also conduct a substantial literature review of the subject. We present a case of a 78-year-old male who was found to have a homogeneously enhancing, dumbbell-shaped, intraspinal, extradural tumor mass extending into the left chest cavity. The tumor was resected with a single-sitting 2-stage posterior technique: a microsurgical approach, followed by endoscopic resection via a thoracoscopic approach. There are several reports in the literature on the combined approach for dumbbell tumors of the spinal cord. Our case is the first to describe 2-stage combined surgery in 1 sitting for dumbbell hemangioma with the patient in the lateral decubitus position for the thoracoscopic part of the surgery; and the use of a fat pad, which was applied in the neuroforamen via the posterior route, as a marker for resection during the transthoracic procedure.
2 Liveness in Abstract Reduction

In this paper, we show how the problem of verifying liveness properties is related to terminat ion of term rewrite systems (TRSs). vVe formalize liveness in the framework of rewriting and present a sound fUld complete transformation to transform liveness problems into TRSs. Then the tnmsformed TRS terminates if and only if the original liveness property holds. This shows that liveness and termination are essentially equivaJent. To apply our approach in practice, we introduce a simpler sound transformation which only satisfies the 'only if' -pa.rt. By refining existing techniques for proving termination of TRSs we show how liveness properties can be verified automatically. As exmnples, we prove a liveness property of a waiting line protocol for a network of processes and aliveness property of a protocol on a ring of processes.
The defective seed 5 ( des 5 ) mutant : effects on barley seed development and HvDek 1 , HvCr 4 , and HvSal 1 gene regulation

Barley, one of the major small grain crops, is especially important in climatically demanding agricultural areas of the world, with multiple uses within food, feed, and beverage. The barley endosperm is further of special scientific interest due to its three aleurone cell layers, with the potential of bringing forward the molecular understanding of seed development and cell specification from Arabidopsis and maize. Work done in Arabidopsis and maize indicate the presence of conserved seed developmental pathways where Crinkly4 (Cr4), Defective kernel1 (Dek1), and Supernumerary aleurone layer1 (Sal1) are key players. With the use of microscopy, a comprehensive phenotypic characterization of the barley defective seed5 (des5) mutant is presented here. The analysis further extends to molecular quantification of gene expression changes in the des5 mutant by qRT-PCR. Moreover, full-length genomic sequences of the barley orthologues were generated and these were annotated as HvDek1, HvCr4, and HvSal1. The most striking results in this study are the patchy reduction in number of aleurone cells, rudimentary anticlinal aleurone cell walls, and the specific change of HvCr4 expression compared to HvDek1 and HvSal1. The data presented support the involvement of Hvdes5 in establishing aleurone cells. Finally, how these results might affect the current model of aleurone and epidermal cell identity and development is discussed with a speculation regarding a possible role of Des5 in regulating cell division/ secondary cell wall building.
Core-Liquid-Induced Transition from Coaxial Electrospray to Electrospinning of Low-Viscosity Poly(lactide-co-glycolide) Sheath Solution

Co-electrospinning has demonstrated that polymer solutions below the entanglement concentration can be made into fibers as an encapsulated core in an electrospinnable sheath solution containing a carrier/template polymer. The carrier polymer may require removal at a later stage. This work shows for the first time that without increasing the polymer concentration/molecular weight or needing a template polymer, simply infusing a liquid in the core nozzle can cause the sheath polymer solution (viscosity <20 mPa s) to electrospin instead of electrospray in a coaxial electrified jet. Different from coelectrospinning, the core liquid can be a common solvent such as water and does not require a readily electrospinnable carrier polymer. The process was not limited to one core liquid system; infusing solvents and nonsolvents with different properties in the core generated either beaded fibers or continuous fibers from the sheath solution. The process of fiber formation instead of particle breakup was attributed to the relaxation time of the elastic polymer sheath solution becoming longer than the growth rate of the Rayleigh instability in the compound jet upon the infusion of a second solvent in the core. Key parameters of the process included high surface tension of the core liquid (e.g., water and glycerol), high interfacial tension between the core and the sheath liquids, and electrohydrodynamic operating parameters such as flow rate and applied voltage. Given that charge was transferred from the sheath solution to the core liquid, differences in the dielectric constant and electrical conductivity of the core liquids showed little influence on the process. Fibers also formed irrespective of the miscibility and solubility of the solvent, though in the case of a nonsolvent, a lower miscibility was desirable to minimize polymer precipitation at the core–sheath interface. The process was investigated using poly(lactide-co-glycolide) as a model system, with polycaprolactone and polymethylsilsesquioxane systems presented as two additional examples. This work documents new roles of solvents in coaxial electrohydrodynamic processes and presents a useful method to obtain micro- and nanofibers from low-viscosity solutions without using a template polymer.
Working Paper Series No : 2019 / 05 Cambridge Working Papers in Economics : 1922 DEMAND CYCLES AND HETEROGENEOUS CONFORMITY PREFERENCES

The paper analyzes the dynamics of demand for three options when agents differ in their preferences for conformity. Each agent seeks to imitate others who are more individualistic and to distinguish herself from others who are more conformist, relative to herself. In each period, every agent chooses her utility-maximizing option given each agent’s demand in the previous period. It is shown that for a large class of initial demand distributions, demand dynamics resemble fashion cycles: Total demand for each option over time is wave-like, and, when positively demanded, an option trickles through the entire population, from individualistic towards conformist agents.
NEC V850 family a challenge for 3 phase inverters control

3 phase inverters are used in industry, in a wide range of applications, like AC and BLDC motor control, or active power filters control. The economic constraints and new standards legislated by governments place increasingly stringent requirements on electrical systems. The new generations of equipment must have higher performance parameters such as better efficiency and reduced electromagnetic interference. To fulfill these requirements the control units of the inverters must have powerful processors which can perform enhanced algorithms to reduce torque ripples and harmonics, and to improve dynamic behavior. This paper provides, in the first part, an overview of the main control methods of inverters in an AC motor control application and in an active power filter application. The second part provides an overview of NEC V850 capabilities for inverter control including some examples.
Selection of Embedding Area: A Better Way to Use Prediction-Error Expansion Method for Reversible Hiding

Reversible data hiding is widely used because the host image can be recovered without errors after the extraction of hidden data. One of the popular schemes for reversibility involves the use of prediction-error expansion (PEE). Scholars often modify the basic PEE scheme to hide more secret bits or to improve the quality in stego images. Examples include the pairwise PEE, the difference expansion approach , and others. In our PEE-based method here, by identifying which parts of a prediction error histogram indicate inefficient hiding, we propose increasing the ratio of pixels hiding data to the pixels shifted without hiding data, called the efficiency ratio (ER). We used four tests to improve ER and hence improve the quality of stego images. The basic concept of our method is to check whether an image block or pixel is suitable for embedding data. After deleting the blocks or pixels that are likely to yield erroneous predictions, we can reduce the chance of a high PE. A high PE not only deteriorates the quality of stego images, but also contributes nothing to the embedding capacity. As shown in experiments, our image quality is better than that of many other PEEbased algorithms when similar amounts of data are hidden.