Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-Defender Strategic Filtering Against Spear-Phishing Attacks

Spear-phishing attacks pose a serious threat to sensitive computer systems, since they sidestep technical security mechanisms by exploiting the carelessness of authorized users. A common way to mitigate such attacks is to use e-mail filters which block e-mails with a maliciousness score above a chosen threshold. Optimal choice of such a threshold involves a tradeoff between the risk from delivered malicious emails and the cost of blocking benign traffic. A further complicating factor is the strategic nature of an attacker, who may selectively target users offering the best value in terms of likelihood of success and resulting access privileges. Previous work on strategic threshold-selection considered a single organization choosing thresholds for all users. In reality, many organizations are potential targets of such attacks, and their incentives need not be well aligned. We therefore consider the problem of strategic threshold-selection by a collection of independent self-interested users. We characterize both Stackelberg multi-defender equilibria, corresponding to short-term strategic dynamics, as well as Nash equilibria of the simultaneous game between all users and the attacker, modeling long-term dynamics, and exhibit a polynomial-time algorithm for computing short-term (Stackelberg) equilibria. We find that while Stackelberg multi-defender equilibrium need not exist, Nash equilibrium always exists, and remarkably, both equilibria are unique and socially optimal.
Earnings Response Coefficient and Persistence: New Evidence Using Tobin's q as a Proxy for Persistence

Prior studies have documented that the earnings response coefficient is positively related to persistence and growth and negatively related to beta and the risk-free rate. Although these studies provide interesting tests of economic theories, they do not provide a current measure of persistence. A current measure of persistence is useful for investors to assess the information content in current earnings innovations. We provide evidence that indicates a statistically significant positive relation between the earnings response coefficient and Tobin's q, thus suggesting that a firm's q ratio is a current proxy for persistence.
Transmission channels of capital flow shocks: why Korean crisis was so severe

The Asian crisis highlighted the vulnerability of emerging market economies faced by sudden capital flow reversals. An important question that has critical implications for crisis management is how negative shocks in capital inflows were transmitted to economic activities, transforming financial instability into fully-fledged crises. Using VARs, this paper analyzes the transmission mechanism of capital flow shocks during the Korean crisis of 1997-98. Although it is commonly believed that severe economic contractions were caused by credit crunch, the analysis suggests that the major constraint for production was a steep rise in prices of imported inputs due to sharp exchange rate depreciations.
Pivotal Role of TLR4 Receptors in Alcohol-Induced Neuroinflammation and Brain Damage

Toll-like receptors play an important role in the innate immune response, although emerging evidence indicates their role in brain injury and neurodegeneration. Alcohol abuse induces brain damage and can sometimes lead to neurodegeneration. We recently found that ethanol can promote TLR4 signaling in glial cells by triggering the induction of inflammatory mediators and causing cell death, suggesting that the TLR4 response could be an important mechanism of ethanol-induced neuroinflammation. This study aims to establish the potential role of TLR4 in both ethanol-induced glial activation and brain damage. Here we report that TLR4 is critical for ethanol-induced inflammatory signaling in glial cells since the knockdown of TLR4, by using both small interfering RNA or cells from TLR4-deficient mice, abolished the activation of microtubule-associated protein kinase and nuclear factor-κB pathways and the production of inflammatory mediators by astrocytes. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that whereas chronic ethanol intake upregulates the immunoreactive levels of CD11b (microglial marker) and glial fibrillary acidic protein (astrocyte marker), and also increases caspase-3 activity and inducible nitric oxide synthase, COX-2, and cytokine levels [interleukin (IL)-1β, tumor necrosis factor-α, IL-6] in the cerebral cortex of female wild-type mice, TLR4 deficiency protects against ethanol-induced glial activation, induction of inflammatory mediators, and apoptosis. Our findings support the critical role of the TLR4 response in the neuroinflammation, brain injury, and possibly in the neurodegeneration induced by chronic ethanol intake.
Epidemiology and Cause-Specific Outcome of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy in Children: Findings From the Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Registry

Background— Current information on the epidemiology and outcomes of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) in children is limited by disease diversity and small case series. Methods and Results— The Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Registry has collected prospective and retrospective data on children diagnosed with HCM since 1990. We identified the various causes of HCM in childhood and determined the relationship between outcomes, cause, and age at presentation. Of 855 patients <18 years of age with HCM, 8.7% (n=74) had inborn errors of metabolism, 9.0% (n=77) had malformation syndromes, 7.5% (n=64) had neuromuscular disorders, and 74.2% (n=634) had idiopathic HCM. Children with HCM associated with inborn errors of metabolism and malformation syndromes have significantly worse survival than the other 2 groups. Patients with idiopathic HCM diagnosed before 1 year of age (n=227) had worse survival from the time of diagnosis than those diagnosed after 1 year of age (n=407). Patients with idiopathic HCM who survived to at least 1 year of age, however, had an annual mortality rate of 1% that was similar regardless of whether they were diagnosed before or after 1 year of age. Conclusions— In children, HCM is a diverse disorder with outcomes that depend largely on cause and age. Patients presenting before 1 year of age have the broadest spectrum of causes and the poorest outcome. In those children with idiopathic HCM who survive beyond age 1, however, survival is independent of age at diagnosis, with an annual mortality rate (1%) that is much lower than previously reported in children and is not different from has been found in population-based studies in adults.
An Interactive Module-Based Software Architecture for Experimental Autonomous Robots

A good software architecture is one of the major factors that determines the success of realizing a robot application. The software architecture should implement the requirements that have been formulated for different problem areas indicated by the robot application designer. We are currently working on an experimental robot project to create an autonomous domestic “scout” that will interact with its user by means of emotional feedback. Three problem areas have been identified by the robot application designer: 1) reusing and integrating existing software code with new to be written software code, 2) having an interactive development framework in which the designer can easily test different software configurations at runtime, and 3) implementing the robot application using a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. In this paper we present a global overview of a software architecture that we have developed to deal with these problem areas.
Design by Example for SQL Tables with Functional Dependencies

An Armstrong relation satisfies the functional dependencies (FD) implied by a given FD set and violates all other FDs. Therefore, they form an instance of the design-by-example methodology: the example relation exhibits precisely those FDs that the current design perceives as meaningful for the application domain. The existing framework of Armstrong relations only applies to total relations. We investigate structural properties of Armstrong relations for FDs over SQL tables. That is, arbitrary attributes can be declared NOT NULL and null values apply Zaniolo’s most general no information interpretation. In contrast to total relations, FDs do not enjoy Armstrong relations. However, the class of standard FDs with arbitrary NOT NULL constraints does enjoy Armstrong relations. While the problem of finding an Armstrong relation is shown to be precisely exponential, we establish an algorithm that computes Armstrong relations with a size at most quadratic in that of a minimum-sized Armstrong relation. Our results enable designers to make effective use of Armstrong relations for real SQL tables. This can lead to real world designs that guarantee efficient ways of data processing.
TROPICAL FOREST CHANGE ASSESSMENT: THE USE OF AGGREGATES, A SEMANTIC APPROACH

Assessing land cover changes in tropical rain forest areas is an issue of worldwide importance. Multi-spectral, higher spatial resolution satellite data are often the only data source for generating the necessary change information. Applying conventional remote sensing processing methods, however, induce uncertainties for both the spatial and thematic components of land cover changes in tropical rain forest areas. The induced uncertainties are not a problem of mixed- pixels, but concern: (a) the relation between the aggregation level of change processes in tropical rain forests and the measurement resolution of the remote sensing data used to observe these change processes, and (b) the problem of handling heterogeneous object classes with fuzzy extents at supra-pixel level. To model the object-related induced uncertainties the concept of a process-driven semantic approach is described in this article. It is based on the use of aggregate sets occurring at supra-pixel level to model changes of heterogeneous spatial objects with fuzzy extents. A conceptual framework on aggregate sets, aggregate classification and aggregate change assessment is defined and related classification and change assessment models are described. The methodical development to process remote sensing imagery at supra-pixel level for different aggregation levels of land cover changes, is a further step to model real-world phenomena.
Inefficient Investment and the Diversification Discount: Evidence from Corporate Asset Purchases

: We provide evidence that investment efficiency considerations are important in assessing changes in firm value surrounding asset purchases. We account for both the potential endogeneity in purchase decisions and the measurement error in Tobin's q. We find that post-purchase, there are significant declines in both excess value and investment efficiency. This trend occurs primarily among those firms that demonstrate increased diversity following purchases. The change in excess value for diversity-increasing buyers is positively related to the change in investment allocation surrounding the purchase.
Assessing frailty in the acute medical admission of elderly patients.

BACKGROUND Managing acute admission of frail older patients is a challenge in hospitals. Length of inpatient stay, inpatient mortality and the 90-day readmission rate are significant in this group of patients. The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA), a multidisciplinary diagnostic and treatment process, is the best approach for identifying medical conditions, mental health, functional capacity and social circumstances in acute geriatric care. METHODS A review of the records of older patients aged 75 and over, acutely admitted to a district general hospital in England from 15 March 2012 to 16 April 2012 was conducted. We developed a frailty assessment tool and applied it to these patients, in order to determine who would be classified as frail. We then established if the patients meeting this criteria were then correctly assessed using the CGA. All patient data were processed and analysed using a statistical package for data analysis. RESULTS A total of 232 patients with a mean age of 84.25 ± 5.8 years were included. Out of these, 129 patients (55.6%) fulfilled the frailty criteria as determined with our frailty-assessment tool; 80.6% presented with lack of mobility over 24 hours, 69.8% were admitted with falls, 47.3% had known dementia or delirium and 45% were admitted from care homes. Patients aged over 85 years were more likely to have frailty compared with patients aged 75-85 years old (odds ratio [OR]: 4.78, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 2.6-8.6, p value >0.001). Patients assessed by a front door geriatric team were more likely to be reviewed with the CGA than those not seen by this team (adjusted OR 2.8, 95% CI: 1-7.6, p value=0.04). CONCLUSION The prevalence of frailty is high in acute admissions of older patients and it is important that they are properly identified and assessed with a CGA in order to ensure effective multidisciplinary care.
Comparative Government: A Reader

This textbook provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the institutions and patterns of behaviour of the countries of the contemporary world. The various political systems are compared and contrasted both in general terms and according to their characteristic structures. today, the characteristics and the role of groups, and the effect of the communications media. It examines in depth the origins, bases, and structures of political parties, the type of party system and the overall role of parties in contemporary politics. It then goes on to examine the formal institutions, analyzing the role of constitutions, the extent of decentralization, the characteristics of legislatures and the structure and impact of executives and political leaders. A final section is devoted to the part played by bureaucracies, the military and the courts in political life and discusses the extent to which ordinary people participate directly in politics.
Identification of Causal Variables for Building Energy Fault Detection by Semi-supervised LDA and Decision Boundary Analysis

This paper addresses the identification problem of causal variables for the system anomaly. In real-world complicated systems, even experts often fail to specify causal factors, thus they attempt to detect the anomaly with exploratory heuristics. Our goal is to offer further information that supports anomaly cause analysis using the incomplete empirical knowledge. Proposed technique discovers responsible factors for the fault by leveraging domain knowledge with an effective combination of semi-supervised linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and boundary-based discriminative subspace identification method. Experimental results on synthetic and real dataset confirmed validity of our approach. Moreover, we applied this method to the building energy fault diagnosis and succeeded in extracting causal variables for energy waste in a building.
Viral G Protein–Coupled Receptor and Kaposi's Sarcoma

The most recently identified human herpesvirus, Kaposi's sarcoma (KS)-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) or human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8), has been found to be a necessary, although perhaps not sufficient, etiologic agent for all forms of KS ([1][1])([2][2]). This virus is also invariably present in a rare
Systolic array architecture implementing Berlekamp-Massey-Sakata algorithm for decoding codes on a class of algebraic curves

We construct a two-dimensional systolic array implementing the Berlekamp-Massey-Sakata (BMS) algorithm to provide error-locator polynomials for codes on selected algebraic curves. This array is constructed by introducing some new polynomials in order to increase the parallelism of the algorithm. The introduced polynomials are used in the majority logic scheme by Sakata et al. to correct errors up to the designed minimum distance without affecting its high speed. The arrangement of the nearest local connection of processing units in the systolic array is obtained for the general case. Furthermore, shortened systolic arrays that reduce the circuit scale and have the same function are constructed with only a slight modification of the connections and controls; this enables the adjustment of the circuit scale for different types of systems.
A study on a “Three-Layered-Structure Open Innovation Foundation” accelerating the interaction of Innovation

With maturation of developed nations' market and rise of emerging nations' market, diversity of the markets and competitiveness of the global business environment have increased. As for the enterprise, better organizational ability based on “Knowledge-Creating Activities” becomes indispensable for continuously new value-creating and value-acquiring functions. SECI Model has been well known in organizational knowledge-creating activities. In organizational knowledge-creating activities, “Ba” has a key role. For the creation of “Ba,” the importance of forming the architecture of organizational knowledge-creating activities that make “man” the starting point is pointed out. In this paper, the essence of a new network system is grasped as a “Knowledge Creating- Activity Support-type Network” in which “digitalized information of knowledge, technology, and experience” can interact, be stored, and be reused. Based on this vision, by utilizing the concept of SECI Model, the configuration method of a “Three-Layered-Structure Open Innovation Foundation” which accelerates the interaction of technological innovation, business innovation, and social innovation is studied.
Pks 0116+082: An Optically Variable Compact Steep-spectrum Source in A Narrow-line Radio Galaxy

Polarimetry of the narrow-line radio galaxy PKS 0116+082 at the W. M. Keck telescope shows that it has high and variable optical polarization, which is presumably due to synchrotron radiation. It is not a BL Lac object because it has strong narrow lines, and it is not an optically violent variable quasar because it has no broad lines and the extended galaxy is prominent. VLA and VLBA images show that it is a compact steep-spectrum radio source with most of the emission coming from a region less than 100 mas in size. Of the 25 compact steep-spectrum or gigahertz peaked-spectrum sources measured polarimetrically, four have high optical polarization. One of these has been observed only once, but in the other three, the polarization is variable. This gives an intriguing hint that variability may be a general property of these objects.
Attributes for Improved Attributes

We introduce a method for improving facial attribute predictions using other attributes. In the domain of face recognition and verification, attributes are high-level descriptions of face images. Attributes are very useful for identification as well as image search as they provide easily understandable descriptions of faces, rather than most other image descriptors (i.e. HOG, LBP, and SIFT). A facial attribute is typically considered a binary variable: 0 meaning the face does not exhibit the attribute, and 1 meaning that it does. Work up to the present has considered all attributes of a face to be independent. However, we know that many face attributes are highly correlated, i.e. gender and facial hair. We propose to take advantage of these correlations to improve attribute classification. We study the attribute correlations in a very challenging face dataset, and demonstrate that both automatic correlation discovery and manual correlation rules result in an increase in classification for binary attributes. This is the first work to utilize the relationship amongst binary attributes for improved classification performance. Using a deep convolutional neural network for feature extraction and classification, along with our automatic correlation discovery method, we achieve state-ofthe-art results for attribute classification.
A Lightweight Reputation System for Bartering Exchange Based Incentive Mechanisms in Peer-to-Peer Systems

One of the major obstacles to the development of the Peer-to-Peer systems is the free riding problem, which significantly degrades the scalability, fault tolerance and content availability of the systems. Bartering exchange ring based incentive mechanism is one of the most common solutions to this problem. It organizes the users with asymmetric interests in the bartering exchange rings, enforcing the users to contribute while consuming. However, the rational nodes still have the opportunities to gain utility without providing complete services to the others. Moreover the malicious free riders could be fatal to all the bartering exchange rings. This paper proposes a reputation system that allows the users to identify free riders by fully utilizing their local transaction information. The identified free riders are recorded in the nodes’ individual blacklists and thus they will be isolated. The simulated results indicate that by applying the proposed reputation system, the request success rate can be noticeably increased since more rational nodes are forced to become cooperative and the malicious free riders can hardly participate in the bartering exchange rings.
A Dynamic Current Mode Logic to Counteract Power Analysis Attacks

Since their publication in 1998, power analysis attacks have attracted significant attention within the cryptographic community. So far, they have been successfully applied to different kinds of implementations (e:g: smart cards, ASICs, FPGAs) of cryptographic algorithms. To protect such devices against power analysis attacks, it has been proposed to use a dynamic and differential logic style for which the power consumption does not depend on the data handled. In this paper, we suggest to use the Dynamic Current Mode Logic to counteract power analysis. The resulting circuits exhibit similar resistance to the previously published proposals but significantly reduce the power delay product. We also demonstrate that certain criteria previously used to evaluate the resistance against power analysis have no cryptographic relevance.
Far-IR Vibration-Rotation-Tunnelling Spectroscopy of the Water Trimer

Tunable far-infrared laser vibration–rotation–tunnelling spectroscopy (FIRVRTS) has been used to measure several intermolecular vibrations in the water trimer. Together with ab initio and group theoretical results, these data characterize the structure and especially the tunnelling dynamics of this system in considerable detail.
Evolution of the Alx homeobox gene family: parallel retention and independent loss of the vertebrate Alx3 gene

SUMMARY The Alx gene family is implicated in craniofacial development and comprises two to four homeobox genes in each vertebrate genome analyzed. Using phylogenetics and comparative genomics, we show that the common ancestor of jawed vertebrates had three Alx genes descendent from the two‐round genome duplications (Alx1, Alx3, Alx4), compared with a single amphioxus gene. Later in evolution one of the paralogues, Alx3, was lost independently from at least three different vertebrate lineages, whereas Alx1 and Alx4 were consistently retained. Comparison of spatial gene expression patterns reveals that the three mouse genes have equivalent craniofacial expression to the two chick and frog genes, suggesting that redundancy compensated for gene loss. We suggest that multiple independent loss of one Alx gene was predisposed by extensive and persistent overlap in gene expression between Alx paralogues. Even so, it is unclear whether it was coincidence or evolutionary bias that resulted in the same Alx gene being lost on each occasion, rather than different members of the gene family.
Authentic Sights and Authentic Narratives on Taglit

In this paper presented at the 2001 annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, the author addresses common perceptions of tourism as shallow, frivolous and inauthentic. This paper examines the use of tourism for the purposes of Jewish education through the Taglit/birthright Israel program. An analysis of ethnographic data from the evaluation of Taglit contradicts expert predictions to the contrary. Findings reveal that Taglit tourists’ perceptions of an authentic Jewish experience were rooted in perceptions of Jewish authenticity in both Israel and themselves.