Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Security Bootstrap and Measurements

Security bootstrap is important to the platform security. If the bootstrap is not secure, Rootkits, Viruses and Trojan horses may be loaded into kernel, thus the following defenses built on the compromised kernel may be useless. In this paper, a trusted-computing based security bootstrap is introduced. We modify trust chain defined by Trusted Computing Group slightly by introducing a new component called PMBR, to implement a more flexible security bootstrap. Comparing against existing works, our contributions are as follows: (1) Our approach can automatically recover programs being attacked. Furthermore, the "attack codes" inserted by attackers can be extracted and their corresponding physical addresses can be located at the same time. (2) We theoretically prove the security of the modified trust chain. (3) We investigate the formal development of PMBR based on B method.
On the influence of resonant absorption on the iron emission-line profiles from accreting black holes

The fluorescent iron Kα emission-line profile provides an excellent probe of the innermost regions of active galactic nuclei. Fe xxv and Fe xxvi in diffuse plasma above the accretion disc can affect the X-ray spectrum by iron Kα resonant absorption. This in turn can influence the interpretation of the data and the estimation of the accretion disc and black hole parameters. We embark on a fully relativistic computation of this effect and calculate the iron line profile in the framework of a specific model in which rotating, highly ionized and resonantly absorbing plasma occurs close to the black hole. This can explain the features seen in the iron Kα line profile recently obtained by Nandra et al. for the type 1 Seyfert galaxy NGC 3516. We show that the redshift of this feature can be mainly gravitational in origin and accounted for without the need to invoke fast accretion of matter on to the black hole. New X-ray satellites such as XMM, ASTRO-E and Chandra provide excellent opportunities to test the model against high-quality observational data.
Cinematic Bokeh rendering for real scenes

In this work, we present a novel approach for rendering high-quality Bokeh and depth-of-field for real, non-computer graphics scenes by synthesizing a real lens and involving depth. Although this discipline is well-known to methods in computer graphics, their transition to real content is pending due to the lack of real scene geometry. Our approach utilizes a highly integrated RGBD camera as well as a lens Bokeh archive which is derived from high-quality lens point-spread function measurements. Our novel kernel stitching renderer which implicitly employs non-recursive ray tracing, incorporates both contributions. Thereby, we obtain spatially and depth-varying, photo-realistic and high-dynamic Bokeh shapes, as well as inherently realistic depth-of-field renderings per pixel without image-space splatting. This methodology allows for an increased creative choice in the depth-of-field setting without enforcing the final depth-of-field blur being burned-in while capturing. We explicitly show that our rendering methodology compares to real references of a high-quality reference lens.
VISUAL EVOKED POTENTIAL STUDY IN MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS DISEASE

Purpose: To demonstrate visual evoked potential (VEP) changes in multiple sclerosis (MS) disease Methods: A case series study of VEP changes in forty-nine patients with definite, probable and possible diagnoses of MS referred to electrophysiology ward from January 2002 to December 2005. Pattern VEP was done for those with good visual acuity (VA), and flash VEP was done for those who did not have central fixation or good VA. Characteristics of P100 wave in pattern VEP and P2 wave in flash VEP were evaluated. Results: The implicit time of P100 and P2 waves in pattern and flash VEP, demonstrated severe abnormalities in 84.5% of definite MS. In probable MS, implicit time increased in 81.8% cases. In possible MS cases, increased implicit time was seen in more than 50% of patients. Decrease in amplitude alone, was seen in a few cases. Combined changes of implicit time and amplitude were prominent. Conclusion: VEP is an invaluable electrophysiological test in MS for both diagnosis and follow-up of the patients. Concurrent with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) analysis, VEP can help neurologists and ophthalmologists for better evaluation of MS patients.
Software Engineers' Attitudes Towards Organizational Change - an Industrial Case Study

In order to cope with a complex and changing environment, industries seek to find new and more efficient ways to conduct their business. According to previous research, many of these change efforts fail to achieve their intended aims. Researchers have therefore sought to identify factors that increase the likelihood of success and found that employees' attitude towards change is one of the most critical. The ability to manage change is especially important in software engineering organizations, where rapid changes in influential technologies and constantly evolving methodologies create a turbulent environment. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no studies exist that explore attitude towards change in a software engineering organization. In this case study, we have used industry data to examine if the knowledge about the intended change outcome, the understanding of the need for change, and the feelings of participation affect software engineers' openness to change and readiness for change respectively, two commonly used attitude constructs. The result of two separate multiple regression analysis showed that openness to change is predicted by all three concepts, while readiness for change is predicted by need for change and participation. In addition, our research also provides a hierarchy with respect to the three predictive constructs' degree of impact. Ultimately, our result can help managers in software engineering organizations to increase the likelihood of successfully implementing change initiatives that result in a changed organizational behavior. However, the first-order models we propose are to be recognized as early approximations that captures the most significant effects and should therefore, in future research, be extended to include additional software engineering unique factors.
Complementarity, Organizational Structure, and Incentives

This paper considers the implications of production externalities on organizational structure decisions and the design of optimal incentives for segment managers. It is assumed that the firm produces multiple products in multiple countries and that complementarities are present when managers are assigned by country, but not when they are assigned by product. The principal tension governing how the firm is organized is between a heterogeneity loss due to aggregating performance measures when divisions are organized by country and the productivity gains and positive information externalities available under that organizational structure. A basic insight is that divisional profits are more informative as signal in contracting with managers when their efforts applied to production are complements. This enhanced informativeness improves contracting efficiency by mitigating the implicit costs of the heterogeneity loss in this case. While the analysis is usefully illustrated by the product versus geographic divisions choice, it would seem to apply more broadly to many settings in which task assignments impact on the presence of production externalities.
Middle Eastern lives in America

Chapter 1 How They Came to America and Where They Are Today Chapter 2 Stereotypes of Islam and the Dubious Link with Terrorism Chapter 3 "Us" Versus "Them" Chapter 4 The Stigma of Brown Skin and "Foreign" Names Chapter 5 The Thin Veneer of Civility: Relearning the American Dream Chapter 6 Living with Discrimination Chapter 7 "I Am a Middle Eastern American! :" Ethnic Self-Identification Chapter 8 "Whining" About Social Justice?
USENIX Association Proceedings of the FREENIX Track : 2001 USENIX Annual

Multiple threads running in a single, shared address space is a simple model for writing parallel programs for symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines and for overlapping I/O and computation in programs run on either SMP or single processor machines. Often a long running program’s user would like the program to save its state periodically in a checkpoint from which it can recover in case of a failure. This paper introduces the first system to provide checkpointing support for multithreaded programs that use LinuxThreads, the POSIX based threads library for Linux. The checkpointing library is simple to use, automatically takes checkpoint, is flexible, and efficient. Virtually all of the overhead of the checkpointing system comes from saving the checkpoint to disk. The checkpointing library added no measurable overhead to tested application programs when they took no checkpoints. Checkpoint file size is approximately the same size as the checkpointed process’s address space. On the current implementation WATER-SPATIAL from the SPLASH2 benchmark suite saved a 2.8 MB checkpoint in about 0.18 seconds for local disk or about 21.55 seconds for an NFS mounted disk. The overhead of saving state to disk can be minimized through various techniques including varying the checkpoint interval and excluding regions of the address space from checkpoints.
ELISPOT Refinement Using Spot Morphology for Assessing Host Responses to Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is a global health problem. The Mycobacterium bovis Bacille Calmette Guerin (BCG) vaccine has variable efficacy (0-80%) so there is a drive to develop novel vaccines. The cytokine, interferon gamma (IFNγ), is an essential component of the protective response to M. tuberculosis (M. tb) infection and is also produced in response to BCG vaccination. Induction of an IFNγ response is used as a biomarker of successful vaccination in the assessment of new tuberculosis (TB) vaccines. The IFNγ ELISPOT assay provides an important tool for TB research. It is used for both the diagnosis of infection (T.Spot assay), and for the evaluation of the immunogenicity of new TB vaccine candidates in human clinical trials, in the non-human primate (NHP) model of TB infection studies. The ELISPOT assay captures IFNγ produced by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) following specific stimulation, onto a membrane so individual cells can be enumerated and the frequency of responding cells determined. Hence spot forming units (SFU) per 106 cells provide the traditional measure for ELISPOT assays. The discriminatory power of SFU is limited. In some situations, the number of SFU in BCG vaccinated, and unvaccinated, subjects was found to be similar, although the spots were observed to be larger in vaccinated subjects. Spot size potentially provides a measure of the quantity of cytokine produced by individual cells. The AID ELISPOT plate reader software used to determine frequency of spots also has the capability to determine the size of each spot. Consideration of spot size in combination with spot forming units was investigated in our studies of BCG immunogenicity. This additional readout was found to enhance the discriminatory power of the ELISPOT assay, and provide more information on the immune response to BCG vaccination and infection with M.tb.
Identification of compositionally distinct regions in genomes using the centroid method

MOTIVATION It is known that most genomic regions of special interest, e.g. horizontally acquired sequences, genomic islands, etc. have distinct word (m-mer) compositions. Most of the earlier work along this direction, addressed di- and tri-nucleotide compositions. We present an approach that can be applied to analyze compositions of any given word size. The method, called the centroid approach, can reveal compositionally distinct regions in genomic sequences for any given word size. RESULTS We applied our method to 50 bacterial genomes and demonstrated its ability to identify embedded sequences of varying lengths from distantly related organisms. We also investigated the genetic makeup of the regions identified as compositionally distinct by our method, for four organisms from our dataset. Pathogenicity island (PAI) components and genes encoding strain-specific proteins are all frequently seen to be constituents of these regions. AVAILABILITY Program is available on request from the authors. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
An Output Sensitive Algorithm for the Computation of Shadow Boundaries

Given a set of polyhedra and a polygon in E3, the –aspect graph is a partition of the faces of the polyhedra into regions such that the area of that is visible from each region has the same structure or “aspect. ” We present an output-sensitive algorithm to compute the –aspect graph. In computer graphics, this problem arises in rendering images of polyhedral scenes illuminated by area light sources. This is the first analytical solution for the problem and the algorithm is simple enough to be useful in practice.
Oscillator Noise Calculation Technique Using Time Varying Model

All oscillators are periodically time varying systems, so to accurate phase noise calculation and simulation, time varying model should be considered. Phase noise is an important characteristic of oscillator design. It defined as the spectral density of the oscillator spectrum at an offset from the center frequency of the oscillator relative to the power of the oscillator. In this paper, we study linear time invariant (LTI) and linear time variant (LTV) model’s to calculate phase noise. Moreover, we propose a simple method for Impulse Sensitivity Function (ISF) calculation. Different oscillators have been selected to evaluate the proposed method. Simulation results show that the proposed method is simpler than other methods, and we can easily simulation ISF.
Lost in the Sauce

Alcohol consumption alters consciousness in ways that make drinking both alluring and hazardous. Recent advances in the study of consciousness using a mind-wandering paradigm permit a rigorous examination of the effects of alcohol on experiential consciousness and metaconsciousness. Fifty-four male social drinkers consumed alcohol (0.82 g/kg) or a placebo beverage and then performed a mind-wandering reading task. This task indexed both self-caught and probe-caught zone-outs to distinguish between mind wandering inside and outside of awareness. Compared with participants who drank the placebo, those who drank alcohol were significantly more likely to report that they were zoning out when probed. After this increase in mind wandering was accounted for, alcohol also lowered the probability of catching oneself zoning out. The results suggest that alcohol increases mind wandering while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of noticing one's mind wandering. Findings are discussed with regard to theories of alcohol and theories of consciousness.
Ontological evaluation of the specification framework proposed by the “ Standardized Specification of Business Components ” memorandum – some preliminary results

The specification framework for business components proposed by the research group Component Oriented Business Application System defines seven specification levels of business components. According to this framework several notations are used to describe a business component, e. g. the OMG Interface Definition Language (OMG IDL) and the Object Constraint Language (OCL). The specification framework implicitly claims to allow a complete specification of a business component. However, this proposition is not justified by the authors of the specification framework. In this paper, we use the Bunge-WandWeber-model (BWW-model) to evaluate the specification frameworks completeness. The BWW-model has already been used for the evaluation of several other modeling grammars. This study demonstrates that the proposed approach is feasible. Based on the preliminary findings, we suggest some directions for further developments of the specification framework.
A spatially explicit model of sapling growth in a tropical forest: does the identity of neighbours matter?

1 We quantified neighbourhood effects on sapling growth for 60 tree species in the 50‐ha plot in Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Additionally, we tested whether target sapling growth responds to taxonomic or functional identity of neighbouring species by comparing four alternate models (that all neighbours have equivalent effects on the target; that conspecific and heterospecific neighbours have distinct effects; that heterospecific neighbours can be divided into confamilials and non‐confamilials; and that they can be divided according to their response to light availability). 2 Over half of the species (34 out of 60) analysed were consistent with all neighbours having equivalent effects on the target. This may result from diffuse evolution allowing tolerance of a large number of neighbouring species or could be a statistical artefact of over‐clumping species into large neighbour groups (e.g. heterospecific neighbours). 3 Other species supported models that differentiated between conspecific and heterospecific (n = 6) or between confamilial vs. non‐confamilial (n = 5) neighbours and, in general, effects of neighbours were stronger if they were more closely related to the target. Where target species differentiated between neighbours from different light guilds (n = 15), effects were stronger if both belonged to the same guild (i.e. both gap requiring or both shade tolerant). 4 Despite the fact that the majority of species did not respond to the identity of neighbours, all differed in their response to the degree of crowding. Our results suggest that the response of target species to crowding, rather than individual species effects on targets, may be subject to selection. 5 Variation among species in response to crowding or to the identity of neighbouring species is likely to contribute to the maintenance of species diversity in tropical forests.
Optimizing production , shipment and inventory policies in a three-stage supply chain

This paper considers an integrated production-inventory model for a three-stage supply chain involving multiple suppliers, multiple manufacturers and multiple retailers. The suppliers/manufacturers produce the raw materials/final goods at a finite rate and deliver the materials/goods in a number of batches to the manufacturers/retailers. Unlike existing models, we analyze the problem where the lead times from the manufacturers to the retailers are stochastic and shortage is allowed. We also explicitly include the transportation costs from the manufacturers to the retailers into the model. The numerical analysis shows that the coordination mechanism employed is more beneficial for the cases with less unpredictable lead times, lower shortage prices, and no transportation cost.
Shock Around the Clock – On the Causal Relations Between International Stock Markets, the Strength of Causality and the Intensity of Shock Transmission. An Econometric Analysis.

This paper investigates empirically the interrelationships between the daily stock market returns of the Nikkei 225, DAX and Dow Jones Industrial index. Contrary to former work this paper uses the succession of the markets in time to form different econometric models. In this way it is possible to detect causality not only from the US to foreign countries but in some cases vice versa. The observation period is October 1985 to Ocotber 1997. Analysis of the structural properties leads to the examination of four separated periods. Results for Hosoyas measure of the strength of causality and impulse response analysis facilitate a dynamic analysis of the causal structure. Increasing influence from NYSE to foreign markets can be shown, whereas influence of the foreign markets on the Dow Jones is decreasing.
The power spectrum of flux-limited X-ray galaxy cluster surveys

We compute the redshift space power spectrum of two X-ray cluster samples: the X-ray Brightest Abell Cluster Sample (XBACS) and the Brightest Cluster Sample (BCS) using the method developed by Feldman, Kaiser & Peacock. The power spectrums derived for these samples are in agreement with determinations of other optical and X-ray cluster samples. For XBACS we find the largest power spectrum amplitude expected given the high richness of this sample (R ≥ 2). In the range 0.05hMpc 1 < k < 0.4hMpc 1 the power spectrum shows a power law behavior P(k) ∝ k n with an index n ≃ −1.2. In a similar range 0.04hMpc 1 < k < 0.3hMpc 1 BCS power spectrum has a smaller amplitude with index n ≃ −1.0. We do not find significant evidence for a peak at k ≃ 0.05hMpc 1 suggesting that claims such of feature detections in some cluster samples could relay on artificial inhomogeneities of the data. We compare our results with power spectrum predictions derived by Moscardini et al. within current cosmological models (LCDM and OCDM). For XBACS we find that both models underestimate the amplitude of the power spectrum but for BCS there is reasonably good agreement at k ∼ 0.03hMpc 1 for both models.
Financial tunnelling and the revenge of the insider system: how to circumvent the new European corporate governance legislation

In this paper, we document how European companies can use financial tunnelling to the disadvantage of minority shareholders, despite improved legislation directed at eliminating such activities. In four case studies, two German and two Italian, we document how newly established corporate governance standards were successfully circumvented by dominant shareholders, major financial institutions, politicians, and in the worst case the regulator. These cases demonstrate that for effective Corporate Governance to work, one not only has to change the law, but even more importantly, one has to ensure the widespread acceptance of new rules. The litmus test of corporate governance reforms in any country is whether the rules are applied objectively in situations where powerful elites perceive they are disadvantaged under the new regulations.
Association of XbaI GLUT1 Polymorphism with Susceptibility to Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Diabetic Nephropathy

Objectives: Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is one of the chronic microangiopathic complications of type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and has become the most frequent cause of end-stage renal disease. The XbaI polymorphism in the glucose transporter (GLUT1) has been suggested in the development of DN. We examined the association between XbaI polymorphism of GLUT1 and susceptibility to T2DM and development of DN. Methods: The study included 227 T2DM patients divided into 107 without DN (DM ? DN) and 120 with DN (DM + DN), in addition to 100 apparently healthy controls. Genotyping was done by polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). Results: The GLUT1 XbaI T allele was associated with increased susceptibility to T2DM, when comparing the healthy controls to the whole diabetic group, odds ratio (OR) = 1.899, 95% confidence interval (CI) (1.149 - 3.136), p = 0.011. This association was also significant between healthy controls and DM ? DN OR = 1.997 (1.079 - 3.699), p = 0.026 as well as between healthy controls and DM + DN OR = 1.818 (1.016 - 3.253), p = 0.042. However there was no significant association of XbaI polymorphism with DN when comparing DM ? DN to DM + DN OR = 0.910 (0.474 - 1.747), p = 0.777. Conclusion: XbaI T allele is associated with increased susceptibility to T2DM, but not to development of DN. Further studies are needed to replicate such findings.