Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ja n 20 18 Forward-Secure Group Signatures from Lattices

Group signature is a fundamental cryptographic primitive, aiming to protect anonymity and ensure accountability of users. It allows group members to anonymously sign messages on behalf of the whole group, while incorporating a tracing mechanism to identify the signer of any suspected signature. Most of the existing group signature schemes, however, do not guarantee security once users’ secret keys are exposed. To reduce potential damages caused by key exposure attacks, Song (ACMCCS 2001) put forward the concept of forward-secure group signatures (FSGS). Nakanishi, Hira, and Funabiki (Pairing 2009) then defined a rigourous security model of FSGS for static groups, and demonstrated a pairing-based instantiation satisfying the model. Subsequently, Libert and Yung (ASIACCS 2010) extended Nakanishi et al.’s work to handle dynamically growing groups. For the time being, all known secure FSGS schemes are based on number-theoretic assumptions, and are vulnerable against quantum computers. In this work, we construct the first lattice-based FSGS scheme. In Nakanishi et al.’s model, our scheme achieves forward-secure traceability under the Short Integer Solution (SIS) assumption, and offers full anonymity under the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption. At the heart of our construction is a scalable lattice-based key-evolving mechanism, allowing users to periodically update their secret keys and to efficiently prove in zero-knowledge that the key-evolution process is done correctly. To realize this essential building block, we first employ the Bonsai-tree structure by Cash et al. (EUROCRYPT 2010) to handle the key evolution process, and then develop Langlois et al.’s construction (PKC 2014) to design its supporting zero-knowledge protocol. In comparison to all known lattice-based group signatures (that are not forward-secure), our scheme only incurs a very reasonable overhead: the bit-sizes of keys and signatures are at most O(log N), where N is the number of group users; and at most O(log T ), where T is the number of time periods.
Oases: robust de novo RNA-seq assembly across the dynamic range of expression levels

Motivation: High-throughput sequencing has made the analysis of new model organisms more affordable. Although assembling a new genome can still be costly and difficult, it is possible to use RNA-seq to sequence mRNA. In the absence of a known genome, it is necessary to assemble these sequences de novo, taking into account possible alternative isoforms and the dynamic range of expression values. Results: We present a software package named Oases designed to heuristically assemble RNA-seq reads in the absence of a reference genome, across a broad spectrum of expression values and in presence of alternative isoforms. It achieves this by using an array of hash lengths, a dynamic filtering of noise, a robust resolution of alternative splicing events and the efficient merging of multiple assemblies. It was tested on human and mouse RNA-seq data and is shown to improve significantly on the transABySS and Trinity de novo transcriptome assemblers. Availability and implementation: Oases is freely available under the GPL license at www.ebi. ac.uk/~zerbino/oases/ Contact: dzerbino@ucsc.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Consumer behaviour at the impulse product with product defect

The aim of the research was to understand and describe the praline consumption behaviour and effect of the product defect, blooming on the behaviour by using Theory of Planned Behaviour model in Hungary. The extended TPB model was used in the experiment. The whole experiment on extended Theory of Planned Behaviour model was also used in Belgium led by University of Ghent. The TPB model was extended with a new contrast as desire and the impact of negative experience on consumer behaviour was also examined via tasting session (N: 120). Totally 400 consumers were involved in the survey. The instruction from Ajzen was followed in the evaluation. As a part of it the regression analysis was used to define the main factors having impact on the behaviour of the consumers. Based on the results we could conclude that the factor desire was influencing the behaviour together with behaviour intention. A positive desire to eat pralines pushed the consumer to actually eat pralines. The explanation of the variances increased when introducing the desire factor. Results also showed that however, the attitude effected greatly the Hungarian consumers, especially after a negative experience (e.g. eating pralines with product defect), the influence of the perceived behaviour control was stronger than the attitude or subjective norm and the effect of desire decreased.
Lobbying and Corporate Influence in Developing Countries : A Multilevel Approach

A large literature examines corporate political activity in the United States, but much less is known about lobbying and corporate influence in less developed nations. This paper relies on the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey, which covers over 20,000 firms operating in 42 developing and transition countries, to examine the determinants of lobbying and perceived policy influence. The results from multilevel models indicate that large oligopolists are more active and influential in the policymaking process. While firm-level factors explain the vast majority of the variation in firms’ political strategies and their effectiveness, I find that country-level political and regulatory institutions also play a role. In particular, regulatory policy volatility increases incentives to lobby, while firms’ reported influence over policy increases with the strength of democratic institutions.
An Analysis of Factors Influencing the Relationship between Satellite-Derived AOD and Ground-Level PM 10

Air pollution can endanger human health, especially in urban areas. Assessment of air quality primarily relies on ground-based measurements, but these provide only limited information on the spatial distribution of pollutants. In recent years, satellite derived Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) has been used to approximate particulate matter (PM) with varying success. In this study, the relationship between hourly mean concentrations of particulate matter with a diameter of 10 micrometers or less (PM10) and instantaneous AOD measurements is investigated for Berlin, Germany, for 2001–2015. It is found that the relationship between AOD and PM10 is rarely linear and strongly influenced by ambient relative humidity (RH), boundary layer height (BLH), wind direction and wind speed. Generally, when a moderately dry atmosphere (30% < RH≤ 50%) coincides with a medium BLH (600–1200 m), AOD and PM10 are in the same range on a semi-quantitative scale. AOD increases with ambient RH, leading to an overestimation of the dry particle concentration near ground. However, this effect can be compensated if a low boundary layer (<600 m) is present, which in turn significantly increases PM10, eventually leading to satellite AOD and PM10 measurements of similar magnitude. Insights of this study potentially influence future efforts to estimate near-ground PM concentrations based on satellite AOD.
Observation of early postoperative hypoxaemia in children undergoing elective plastic surgery

The incidence, severity and duration of early postoperative hypoxaemia were determined in 420 healthy infants and children undergoing elective plastic surgery. Mean value of preoperative Spo2 was 98.3 ± 0.87%. However, it decreased significantly to 92.7 ± 4.01% immediately following anaesthesia in the postanaesthesia recovery room (PAR) when children breathed room air. Then Spo2 gradually increased to 93.8 ± 4.25% at 10 min, 95.4 ± 3.14% at 30 min, 96.6 ± 2.25% at 60 min, 96.9 ± 1.69% at 120 min, and 97.4 ± 1.55% at 180 min, respectively. The incidence of hypoxaemia and severe hypoxaemia, which were 14.8% and 6.2% respectively on arrival in the PAR, decreased significantly to 6.6% and 1.9%, 30 min later. The hypoxaemia occurred most commonly within 1 h, particularly the first 30 min following anaesthesia. The hypoxaemia was more common and more severe in children undergoing cleft palate repair than other kinds of plastic surgery. A significant correlation was found between low Spo2 levels on admission to the PAR and children's age, fentanyl doses, and the infants’ recovery score.
The Impact of Additional Prognostic Factors on Survival and their Relationship with the Anatomical Extent of Disease Expressed by the 6th Edition of the TNM Classification of Malignant Tumors and the Proposals for the 7th Edition

Purpose: To identify, in the international staging database of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, those prognostic factors that were significant and independent of clinical stage. Material and Methods: From the data submitted to the staging data base concerning 100,869 patients, cases were selected for which all the following variables were available: clinical stage, age, gender, performance status (PS), and histologic cell types. For non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), 12,428 patients were assessable, and for SCLC, 6609 patients were available for this study. Methods used were Cox regression analyses and recursive partitioning and amalgamation analyses. Results: PS appeared to be a very important prognostic factor for survival in addition to clinical stage. Age and gender were other independent significant variables; For NSCLC and SCLC separately, recursive partitioning and amalgamation allowed the identification of four groups of patients with differing prognoses. In advanced NSCLC (stage IIIB / IV), some routine laboratory tests (mainly white blood cells and hypercalcaemia) were also found to be significant prognostic variables. In SCLC, albumin was an independent biologic prognostic factor. Conclusion: In addition to stage, PS and, to a lesser extent, age and gender seem to be important prognostic factors for survival in lung cancer. Although this data was obtained from the largest series ever used for such an analysis in lung cancer, these prognostic factors and models require confirmation in the prospective study already planned by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Lung Cancer Staging Project.
The Linkage of Government Bond and Stock Markets in China

This paper examines the linkage of government bond and stock markets in China. We illustrate these ideas in simple empirical settings, implementing the relatively techniques from quantile regression. The analysis of extreme quantiles observes that the linkage of government bond and stock markets is negative while the stock market goes down. Our contribution provides the ability to estimate the diversification effects to international investors that are attributed to the government bond and stock market in China. This study has important implications for risk management and asset allocations during extremes. Furthermore, the finding is also important for international asset pricing since the exposure to the joint extreme risk and thus should be included in pricing international assets. Keywords—government bond; quantile regression; linkage; diversification
Performance evaluation of adaptive beamforming in 5G-V2X networks

Vehicles are the third fastest growing connected device type after smart phones and tablets. Also, automotive industry is interested to get more vehicles connected to the internet to improve traffic safety and efficiency. This creates a need for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications. In this work, the possibility of exploiting beamforming in LTE-V2X is considered. Singular value decomposition (SVD) receiver and precoder is implemented in an LTE-A system level simulator and the performance on multi-lane highway scenario is simulated and analyzed in downlink Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) scenario. The performance is compared to the conventional maximum-ratio combining (MRC) and LTE codebook precoded minimum mean square error (MMSE) receivers. In addition, the switched-beam beamforming is imitated by modified antenna patterns with 7 and 15 narrow beams. The results show that the SVD receiver provides gain compared to the conventional MRC and MMSE receivers in ideal scenario. Furthermore, with modified antenna patterns, the performance was enhanced when compared to the default antenna pattern.
Epidemiology and survival of hepatocellular carcinoma in the central region of Thailand.

BACKGROUND Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers in men and the third most common cancer in woman in Thailand. This retrospective study was designed to assess the prevalence, clinical manifestations, treatment outcomes and prognosis of HCC in the central region of Thailand. MATERIALS AND METHODS The authors retrospectively reviewed all HCC patients aged more than 15 years old in Thammasat university hospital (TUH) during the period from January 2007 to December 2012. Clinical information, biochemical tests and radiologic findings were collected from review of medical records. RESULTS There were 308 patients with HCC, which accounted for the prevalence of 5.19% of all cancers diagnosed in TUH during the study period. Of these, 125 (40.5%) had complete information retrievable from their medical records and met the inclusion criteria, 99 (79.2%) were males. The mean age was 57.4 years. A quarter of HCC patients in this study presented without any symptom before diagnosis. The common clinical presentations in the remaining patients were hepatomegaly 64/125 (51.2%), abdominal pain 56/125 (44.8%) and ascites 16/125 (20.8%). Cirrhosis was seen in almost all patients (92.8%). The most common causes of HCC in this study were chronic hepatitis B (49.6%) and C (19.2%). Based on Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer staging, 75.4% presented at intermediate or late stage. Patients receiving curative therapy with either surgical treatment or radiofrequency ablation had significantly longer survival time after the HCC diagnosis than the palliative therapy group (11.0 months vs 4.0 months, p value= 0.004). The mean survival time after the HCC diagnosis was 10.5 months. CONCLUSIONS The common causes of HCC in central region of Thailand were chronic hepatitis B and C. Surgical therapy or RFA seemed to provide better outcomes than other treatments but only in patients with early stage lesions. Most of the patients in this study presented with advanced diseases and had grave prognosis. Appropriate screening patients at risk for HCC might be an appropriate way to achieve early diagnosis and improve the treatment outcome.
TRANSPORT OF HEAT, WATER VAPOR AND CARBON DIOXIDE BY LONG-PERIOD EDDIES IN THE STABLE BOUNDARY LAYER 1.B.1

The vertical transport of heat and trace chemicals for a night in April has been studied with a wavelet analysis and conventional one-hour averages. It was found that for the night of April 20, 2009 turbulent kinetic energy, heat and trace chemicals were transported directed downward from the jet core. The most significant periods for this transport were less than 5 minutes and greater than one hour with intermittent transport taking place in the 5 min to 1 hour time frame.
Studying the Retinal Source of Photophobia by Facial Electroretinography.

PURPOSE Photophobia is a debilitating clinical condition that disrupts the ability to use vision for everyday tasks in bright lighting conditions. The goal of the study is to develop a methodology to study the neural basis of photophobia and the contribution of the melanopic pathway to its etiology with differential chromatic responses by means of standard electroencephalographic recording equipment. METHODS We introduce and validate the approach of recording wavelength-specific electroretinographic (ERG) responses from the face electrodes of the high-density whole-head electroencephalography recording system under light-adapted conditions. RESULTS ERGs recorded in this way to whole-field chromatic stimuli exhibit striking differences between the photophobic and non-photophobic groups. The control responses were consistent with photopic intensity in peak time, and in the ordering of peak times as a function of wavelength condition, indicating a predominantly cone source of the signals. The photophobic responses, on the other hand, were substantially slowed relative to controls, with the peak times conforming to a different order as a function of wavelength condition than controls, implying that the cone response has been suppressed and that the responses derived from a different photoreceptor system consistent with mediation by melanopic retinal ganglion cells. CONCLUSIONS The results will be important for determining the neural pathways involved in photophobia and potential approaches to its treatment on the basis of this etiology.
Pointer Reduction Techniques for Minimising Memory Usage, I/O Bandwidth and Computational Efiort in BDD Applications

BDDs (Binary Decision Diagrams) are often used to represent Boolean expressions in hardware synthesis, hardware and software verification and numerous other applications. BDD computation, implemented using tree data structures with binary nodes, is inherently memory intensive, and therefore suffers from the von Neumann memory bottleneck. This thesis examines an approach which can speed up BDD computation through compression of the graphical structure, reducing the overhead of handling memory pointers, and thereby reducing memory access latency. The novel aspect of this work is that a compression technique is used which allows BDD computation directly on the compressed data without the overheads of compression and decompression. The need for such an approach is driven by technology in two ways: the increasing discrepancy between CPU and memory speeds, and the move towards larger (64 bit) memory architectures. The work applies graph enumeration techniques to classify graph topology using a structural identifier (SID) coding table, providing the basis for algorithms which generate compressed representations. The work uses these new representations to develop algorithms which can pre-calculate results for specific graph-traversal operations in Combination lookup tables (CLT). The work distinguishes itself from other methods of reducing BDD access latency, such as index based systems, by improving spatial locality and simplifying computation at the same time.
A 1-V low-voltage 12-GHz VCO in 0.18-µm CMOS technology

The CMOS process moves into the sub-micron regime, low voltage circuit design techniques will be required for highly integrated wireless transceivers. The complementary CMOS VCO is a simple design topology for high frequency and low phase noise. However, it requires a high supply voltage due to the stacking of transistors. For operating at the low voltage, in this paper a modified complementary coupled-pair CMOS LC-tank oscillator is adopted to design the VCO. A low-voltage and low-phase-noise 12-GHz VCO using the 0.18-mum CMOS process is presented. The fabricated VCO has a good figure of merit (FOM) of -186 dBc/Hz with a 6.2 mW power consumption operating at 1 V.
Free your metadata : Integrating cultural heritage collections through Google Refine reconciliation

A varying level of courtship has always characterized the relation between the field of Library and Information Science and the Semantic Web community. The ambition to bring metadata into the Linked Data cloud draws the two communities closer together than they ever have been before, but metadata practitioners still lack a straightforward methodology and the tools to experiment with Linked Data. This paper gives a pragmatic overview of how a locally developed vocabulary can be successfully reconciled with the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) with the help of Google Refine. The different steps towards reconciliation are performed through freely available metadata and tools, making the process repeatable and understandable for metadata practitioners.
Lipid Mobilization and Inflammation During the Transition Period

The transition period of dairy cows is characterized by changes in the lipid mobilization process in adipose tissues (AT) that include enhanced lipolysis and reduced lipogenesis. This imbalance leads to a net release of non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA) into the AT environment and circulation. Increasing the availability of these energy dense molecules is a mechanism of metabolic adaptation that is necessary to fulfill energy deficits driven by fetal growth and the onset of lactation. However, intense lipolysis and limited rates of lipogenesis lead to a considerable reduction in AT mass during the first 3 weeks after parturition. At the same time, lipolysis induces a remodeling process in AT that is characterized by a moderate inflammatory response with infiltration of macrophages. In cows that transition well into peak lactation, lipolysis decreases and AT inflammation resolves as lactation progresses. Nevertheless, if lipolysis dysregulation occurs and lipolysis rate does not decrease, AT inflammation becomes chronic and leads to poor lactation performance, reproductive failure, and increased risk for culling. This article summarizes the process of lipid mobilization in transition dairy cows, elaborates on the concept of AT remodeling and inflammation, and discusses how these biological processes affect transition cow health and lactation performance. Introduction Lipid mobilization is a bioenergetic process that includes lipogenesis and lipolysis. The AT, as the major body of energy reserve in mammals, is specialized in the storage and release of fatty acids through lipid mobilization. AT lipogenesis comprises the assembly of triglycerides through a stepwise addition of fatty acids catalyzed by glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase, 1-acylglycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase, lipins, and diacylglycerol acyltransferase (Takeuchi and Reue, 2009). During lipolysis, AT’s adipose triglyceride lipase, hormone-sensitive lipase, and monoacylglycerol lipase breakdown the triglyceride molecule into glycerol and NEFA [reviewed by Arner and Langin (2014)]. Released NEFA are either re-esterified to triglycerides through lipogenesis or exported into the bloodstream where they are transported by albumin and Fetuin-A for use in other tissues as fuel or secreted in milkfat (Strieder-Barboza et al., 2018). During the transition period, the net release of NEFA from AT into circulation is the result of reduced lipogenesis and enhanced lipolysis within adipocytes (De Koster et al., 2018). Normally, lipolysis decreases and lipogenesis replenishes adipocytes’ triglyceride stores as lactation progresses. However, when AT exhibits an impaired response to the antilipolytic effects of insulin, lipolysis becomes intense and protracted, and lipogenesis is 1Contact at: 736 Wilson Rd., Room D202, East Lansing, MI 48824, (517) 355-9610. Email: contre28@msu.edu.
Air Pollution Particular Matter and Atherosclerosis.

In recent years, air-pollution in China attracted attention from the social communities and politic governments. The potentially tremendous impact of air pollution on human health has been noticed since 1952 when Great Smog shaded the winter sun in London city. 1 Increasing evidence has linked the exposure of ambient particular matter (PM) air pollutants to increased cardiovascular morbidities and mortalities. 2-4 PM is heterogeneous materials suspended in the air, of varying sizes, number, surface areas, concentrations, and chemical compositions 3 (also see website of United States Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.epa.gov/ clean-air-act-overview). Based on aerodynamic diameters, PMs are classified into thoracic particles (PM > 10 m), coarse particles (PM2.5-10 m), fine particles (PM < 2.5 m), and ultrafine particles (PM < 0.1 m). 5