Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Consistency Is Not Enough in Byzantine Fault Tolerance

The use of good random numbers is crucial to the security of many mission-critical systems. However, when such systems are replicated for Byzantine fault tolerance, a serious issue arises (i.e., how do we preserve the integrity of the systems while ensuring strong replica consistency? ). Despite the fact that there exists a large body of work on how to render replicas deterministic under the benign fault model, the solutions regarding the random number control are often overly simplistic without regard to the security requirement, and hence, they are not suitable for practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In this chapter, the authors present a novel integrity-preserving replica coordination algorithm for Byzantine fault tolerant systems. The central idea behind our CD-BFT algorithm is that all random numbers to be used by the replicas are collectively determined, based on the contributions made by a quorum of replicas, at least f+1 of which are not faulty.
Consumer preferences for fair labour certification

High-profile cases of exploitative labour practices have increased concerns over agricultural working conditions. However, it is unclear to what extent the public is willing to trade-off fair working conditions for higher prices. We implement a large-scale survey in Greece to uncover consumer preferences for a food labelling system that certifies fair working conditions for the workers employed in agricultural production. With our most conservative estimates, we find that consumers are willing to pay an average premium of 53 cents of a Euro per 500 g, 95 per cent CI [43.9, 62.3], for strawberries with fair labour certification. This result suggests that consumers do value the better treatment of workers in the agricultural sector. It also suggests that there is a current market failure, created by the asymmetry of information between consumers and producers, that can be the basis of discussion for alternative labelling schemes involving fair labour labels. We also tested a number of known biases associated with consumer behaviour or the contingent valuation method and found the positive willingness-to-pay result to be robust.
Hypothesis: Artifacts, Including Spurious Chimeric RNAs with a Short Homologous Sequence, Caused by Consecutive Reverse Transcriptions and Endogenous Random Primers

Recent RNA-sequencing technology and associated bioinformatics have led to identification of tens of thousands of putative human chimeric RNAs, i.e. RNAs containing sequences from two different genes, most of which are derived from neighboring genes on the same chromosome. In this essay, we redefine “two neighboring genes” as those producing individual transcripts, and point out two known mechanisms for chimeric RNA formation, i.e. transcription from a fusion gene or trans-splicing of two RNAs. By our definition, most putative RNA chimeras derived from canonically-defined neighboring genes may either be technical artifacts or be cis-splicing products of 5'- or 3'-extended RNA of either partner that is redefined herein as an unannotated gene, whereas trans-splicing events are rare in human cells. Therefore, most authentic chimeric RNAs result from fusion genes, about 1,000 of which have been identified hitherto. We propose a hypothesis of “consecutive reverse transcriptions (RTs)”, i.e. another RT reaction following the previous one, for how most spurious chimeric RNAs, especially those containing a short homologous sequence, may be generated during RT, especially in RNA-sequencing wherein RNAs are fragmented. We also point out that RNA samples contain numerous RNA and DNA shreds that can serve as endogenous random primers for RT and ensuing polymerase chain reactions (PCR), creating artifacts in RT-PCR.
An improved packet collision analysis for multi-Bluetooth piconets considering frequency-hopping guard time effect

Operating in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, a Bluetooth piconet inevitably encounters interference problems from other piconets. With a special channel model and packet formats, one research issue is how to predict the packet collision effect in a multi-piconet environment. In an earlier work (A. El-Hoiydi, IEEE Comm. Ltrs., vol.5(6), p.245-247, 2001), this problem is studied, but the result is still very limited because it is assumed that packets must be single-slot ones and that the time slots of each piconet must be fully occupied by packets. These assumptions have been successfully removed in the analytical results proposed in (T. Lin et al, IEEE Comm. Ltrs., 2003). In this paper, we further improve these analytical results by taking into account the frequency-hopping guard time effect in the Bluetooth baseband. The results offer a way to better estimate the network performance in a multi-piconet environment.
Modeling polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon bioaccumulation and metabolism in time‐variable early life‐stage exposures

Recent laboratory investigations into the bioaccumulation and toxicity of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) have focused on low‐level, time‐variable exposures to early life‐stage fish. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon body‐burden residues reported in these studies were lower than critical body‐burden residues predicted by the target lipid model (TLM). To understand this discrepancy, a time‐variable uptake and depuration model of PAH bioaccumulation was developed. Kinetic constants were fit using measured exposure and tissue concentrations. The resulting lipid‐water partition coefficients (KLW) were uncorrelated with the octanol‐water partition coefficient (Kow)—a qualitatively unrealistic finding considering that numerous studies have reported a positive correlation between the two. Because PAHs are known to be metabolized, the comparison of KLW with Kow suggests that metabolism may be occurring in early life‐stage fish. Therefore, the uptake and depuration model was modified to include metabolism while assuming linearity of KLW with Kow. Calculated metabolism rates were positively correlated with Kow—a finding qualitatively similar to those of other studies. The present study provides a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy between the TLM predictions and the measured toxic effect levels. Given the time‐variable exposure concentrations, the maximum measured body burdens used to relate to toxic effects may be underestimated. In addition, the maximum body burden of parent PAH plus metabolites may be a better measure in relating tissue concentrations to toxic effects. Incorporating these refinements in relating body burdens to toxic effects may result in a better comparison between TLM predictions and measured effect levels.
Software Architectural Support for Handheld Computing the Authors Present a Software-architecture-based Approach to Support Computing on Distributed, Handheld, Mobile, Resource-constrained Devices

S oftware engineers and practitioners traditionally have focused on programming in the large (PitL), the development of large-scale software systems. However, the increasing speed and capacity and decreasing costs of hardware, emergence of the Internet, and proliferation of handheld devices such as cell phones and PDAs have fueled demand for new technologies that support highly distributed computation on small, mobile platforms. Employing handheld mobile devices in complex scenarios such as sea exploration, environmental monitoring, freeway-traffic management, fire fighting, and natural disaster damage assessment will require addressing a number of daunting challenges. This new set of challenges is more appropriately characterized as programming in the small and many (Prism)—software development for highly distributed, dynamic, mobile, heterogenous computation on large numbers of small, resourceconstrained platforms. Recent studies indicate that a promising approach is to apply software architecture principles to the development of software systems in the Prism setting. These principles provide abstractions for representing the system’s structure, behavior, and key properties. Architectures are generally described in terms of components (computational elements), connectors (interaction elements), and their configurations. An architectural style further defines a vocabulary of component and connector types as well as a set of constraints on combining instances of those types in a software system. Examples of styles include blackboard, C2, client-server, pipe and filter, and pushbased. Selecting an appropriate architectural style is a key determinant of a software system’s success. Software architectures provide design-level models and guidelines for composing software systems. However, to be useful in a development setting, these models and guidelines require support for implementation and evolution. As the “Prism Challenges” sidebar describes, Prism’s highly distributed, heterogenous, and mobile nature amplifies the software development demands that permeate the entire software engineering life cycle. Therefore, during the past four years we have focused on the design, implementation, and empirical evaluation of techniques for supporting architecture-based software development in the Prism setting. Several aspects of architecture-based development—component-based system composition, explicit software connectors, architectural styles, upstream system analysis and simulation, and support for dynamism—make it a good fit for Prism’s demands. Our solutions for adaptable system design, efficient implementation, and tailorable execution all leverage the approach’s architectural basis and were guided by four research objectives: The authors present a software-architecture-based approach to support computing on distributed, handheld, mobile, resource-constrained devices.
The Silence of Dissatisfied Customers: An Exploratory Research in an Online Context

Purpose: To explore the phenomenon of silent dissatisfied customers in an online context. Theoretical perspective: In addition to the strategic brand management a customer perspective is grasped. Furthermore, the study explores areas related to service recovery and consumer behaviour. Methodology: We apply an explorative approach in the form of a case study of silent dissatisfied customers from a perspective of strategic brand management. Therefore, we chose to conduct focus groups to enable discussion of situations. Moreover, we applied interviews to discover encouragement of complaints to be voiced. Knowledge is gained from empiricism and therefore we employ grounded theory for our analysis. Findings: There exists four situations when customers remain silent dissatisfied. These situations concern; pre-emptive actions by online businesses, customers’ low expectations and previous negative experiences, customers experience lack of energy and time, and customers’ perceive ignorance by online businesses. Furthermore, both customers and online businesses are more or less responsible for the silence depending on the situation. Theoretical implications: This study highlights the phenomenon of silent dissatisfied customers in an online context. Furthermore, the study provides a framework concerning different situations when customers remain silent dissatisfied. This study contributes to the body of knowledge within the field of strategic brand management from a customer perspective. Managerial implications: With this study, online businesses achieve a deeper understanding of how silent dissatisfied customers are encouraged to forward their opinions to improve. That is practiced with the focus on empathy, easiness, and monetary drivers. Originality: Strategic brand management is studied from the view of customers since brands solely exist within the mind of customers.
Increasing the geometric field of view in head mounted displays through proprioceptive task and multimodal feedback for effective close range interaction

This article explores the synergistic interaction among the geometric field of view (GFOV), proprioceptive interaction and multimodal feedback in a virtual environment. We hypothesise that, with proprioceptive interaction and multimodal feedback, the GFOV can be set larger than its reference value originally set to give similar distance perception when viewed with a given physical field of view of a head mounted display. This in turn would help a user carry out a task more effectively with the increased visibility. We tested our hypothesis with an experiment to measure the user's change in distance perception according to different values of egocentric GFOV and task/feedback conditions (15 subjects). Our experimental results have shown that, when coupled with proprioceptive interaction, the GFOV could be increased up to 170% of the reference without introducing change in user's distance perception. When additional visual and tactile feedback was introduced, the GFOV could be increased up to 200%. The results offer a useful guideline for designing multimodal interfaces for close range spatial tasks in virtual environments. In addition, it demonstrates one way to overcome the inadequacy of the narrow physical fields of view often found in most general purpose head mounted displays.
Designing a Pore-Forming Toxin Cytolysin A (ClyA) Specific to Target Cancer Cells

Program in Molecular and Cellular Biology DEDICATION TO MY CARING GRANDMOTHER iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I take this page to thank everyone who was involved directly or indirectly in this project. To my advisor, Dr. Min Chen, who has given me the chance to work under her experienced guidance and supervision. I would like to also thank the rest of my committee members, Dr. Ludmila Tyler and Dr. David Gross for their invaluable input and for being wonderful professors. I want to also thank my graduate laboratory members, Monifa Fahie, Bib Yang and Christina Chisholm who have taught me all the laboratory techniques. who have kept the lab spirit alive. I would like to further extend my acknowledgment to Monifa Fahie for all the helpful comments and suggestions to this and other documents as well.
Security enhancement of a novel proxy key generation protocol

Proxy signature is a variant of digital signature, in which the proxy signer could sign message on behalf of the original signer. In 2007, Hu et al. introduced a mechanism into the proxy signature model to allow rebuilding the short-term proxy key in a very efficient way. The mechanism reflects the necessary while the content stated in the warrant has been changed. Unfortunately, the new mechanism solves the demand on changing warrant but introduce a new security issue that the genuine long-term secret key of the proxy signer will be exposed if one of the proxy keys is compromised. Therefore, the impersonation attack is possible in Hu et al.'s scheme. In this paper, the security weakness will be examined and remedied. The enhanced version still retains the merits of the original design and this Elliptic curve based scheme is definitely adaptive for the mobile environment to provide a security solution for the next century.
Conceptual Framework for Developing a Diabetes Information Network

Objective: To provide a conceptual framework for managing diabetic patient care, and creating an information network for clinical research. Background: A wide range of information technology (IT) based interventions such as distance learning, diabetes registries, personal or electronic health record systems, clinical information systems, and clinical decision support systems have so far been used in supporting diabetic care. Previous studies demonstrated that IT could improve diabetes care at its different aspects. There is however no comprehensive conceptual framework that defines how different IT applications can support diverse aspects of this care. Therefore, a conceptual framework that combines different IT solutions into a wide information network for improving care processes and for research purposes is widely lacking. In this study we describe the theoretical underpin of a big project aiming at building a wide diabetic information network namely DIANET. Research design and methods: A literature review and a survey of national programs and existing regulations for diabetes management was conducted in order to define different aspects of diabetic care that should be supported by IT solutions. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used in this study. In addition to the results of a previous systematic literature review, two brainstorming and three expert panel sessions were conducted to identify requirements of a comprehensive information technology solution. Based on these inputs, the requirements for creating a diabetes information network were identified and used to create a questionnaire based on 9-point Likert scale. The questionnaire was finalized after removing some items based on calculated content validity ratio and content validity index coefficients. Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient was also calculated (αTotal= 0.98, P<0.05, CI=0.95). The final questionnaire was containing 45 items. It was sent to 13 clinicians at two diabetes clinics of endocrine and metabolism research institute in order to assess the necessity level of the requirements for diabetes information network conceptual framework. The questionnaires were returned by 10 clinicians. Each requirement item was labeled as essential, semi-essential, or non-essential based on the mean of its scores. Results: All requirement items were identified as essential or semi-essential. Thus, all of them were used to build the conceptual framework. The requirements were allocated into 11 groups each one representing a module in the conceptual framework. Each module was described separately. Conclusion: We proposed a conceptual framework for supporting diabetes care and research. Integrating different and heterogeneous clinical information systems of healthcare facilities and creating a comprehensive diabetics data warehouse for research purposes, would be possible by using the DIANET framework.
Real Time Road Lane Segmentation and Tracking System

Robust, low latency road lane detection is essential to the safe operation of an autonomous vehicle. Lane detection is performed by searching an image for lane markers in order to form a model of the lane that the vehicle can follow. Deep Learning CNNs are able to form robust lane models that are able to operate in poor conditions when classical computer vision algorithms will fail. However CNNs are computationally expensive models that are not yet able to detect lanes at the the necessary speed on a desktop machine let alone an embedded device. The concept being explored is how to leverage the visual power of CNNs but be able to obtain information at close to real time speeds. The proposed system is a segmentation CNN and a Bayesian tracking algorithm that is able to achieve the necessary speed but with no loss of information so that an autonomous vehicle can still safely drive within the lane. A segmentation CNN, trained on the KITTI autonomous driving dataset, outputs a dense pixelwise prediction of where the lane is. Blob detection is then performed to extract the most likely set of connected pixels. These predicted lane pixels are used to compute the lane state, which we define as the lane’s inverse radius of curvature and is analogous to the lanes centerline. Since the state variable is continuous, it is nonlinearly discretized and then tracked with a particle filter on a GPU. The particle filter’s output is available even when no image data has been processed by the CNN to provide information about where the lane is currently.
The C-Terminal Domain of Eukaryotic Initiation Factor 5 Promotes Start Codon Recognition by Its Dynamic Interplay with eIF 1 and eIF 2 b

Citation Luna, Rafael E. , Haribabu Arthanari, Hiroyuki Hiraishi, Jagpreet Nanda, Pilar Martin-Marcos, Michelle A. Markus, Barak Akabayov, et al. “The C-Terminal Domain of Eukaryotic Initiation Factor 5 Promotes Start Codon Recognition by Its Dynamic Interplay with eIF1 and eIF2. ” Cell Reports 1, no. 6 (June 2012): 689–702. As Published http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.celrep. 2012.04. 007 Publisher Elsevier
How Does Institutional Context Influence Entrepreneurial Processes of Sri Lankan Small Businesses

Contribution of entrepreneurship for economic growth and social development is univocal among entrepreneurship researchers. However, economic growth statistics show that entrepreneurship has not been worked as a development strategy for many developing countries including Sri Lanka. Thus, this study aimed to examine the influence of institutional context on small businesses in selected contexts in the North Western province following an inductive approach using the case study method. To understand the variation of influence of institutional context, two contrasting contexts were selected from the North-Western province: Kurunegala Township and Degoda-Thurawa. Kurunegala Township was selected to represent formal institutional context and Degoda-Thurawa, which is one of the poorest villages in Kurunagala District was selected to represent self-evolved traditional village where informal institutions are strong. After screening over 100 cases in each context, eight cases were selected in two stages to explore the entrepreneurial processes of small businesses. Using pattern matching techniques, this study found that macroeconomic policies work better in urban context where the number of innovative opportunities identified and exploited is comparatively higher than those of in the rural context. This study concludes that entrepreneurship may not influence on economic growth or social development, by merely changing fiscal and macroeconomic policies without addressing the problem of inertia emanated from informal institutions in the rural sector.
RECODE: Reconfigurable, consistent and decentralized data services

Key-based routing schemes, where a message is forwarded towards a server responsible for a partition in a large name space, does not provide strong delivery guarantees when the network is reconfigured with servers joining and leaving. This best-effort behavior is sufficient for eventually consistent data services such as key-value stores, content distribution networks or publish/subscribe systems. However, such schemes are not able to provide stronger consistency guarantees as required by, for example, metadata services and databases. We present RECODE, a framework for reconfigurable, consistent and decentralized data services. RECODE simplifies the implementation of strongly consistent data services, and continues to provide strong guarantees even during reconfiguration. More specifically, we introduce the routecast primitive which delivers messages for a key in the same total order, independent of the servers responsible for the key.We demonstrate the expressiveness and practical usability of RECODE by presenting three applications: a map of atomic registers, a set of distributed counters, and a lease management system. We evaluate the performance and elasticity of RECODE executing in a cluster.