Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A COMPARATIVE TEST OF ADAPTIVE HYPOTHESES FOR SEXUAL SIZE DIMORPHISM IN LIZARDS

Abstract It is commonly argued that sexual size dimorphism (SSD) in lizards has evolved in response to two primary, nonexclusive processes: (1) sexual selection for large male size, which confers an advantage in intrasexual mate competition (intrasexual selection hypothesis), and (2) natural selection for large female size, which confers a fecundity advantage (fecundity advantage hypothesis). However, outside of several well-studied lizard genera, the empirical support for these hypotheses has not been examined with appropriate phylogenetic control. We conducted a comparative phylogenetic analysis to test these hypotheses using literature data from 497 lizard populations representing 302 species and 18 families. As predicted by the intrasexual selection hypothesis, male aggression and territoriality are correlated with SSD, but evolutionary shifts in these categorical variables each explain less than 2% of the inferred evolutionary change in SSD. We found stronger correlations between SSD and continuous estimates of intrasexual selection such as male to female home range ratio and female home range size. These results are consistent with the criticism that categorical variables may obscure much of the actual variation in intrasexual selection intensity needed to explain patterns in SSD. In accordance with the fecundity advantage hypothesis, SSD is correlated with clutch size, reproductive frequency, and reproductive mode (but not fecundity slope, reduced major axis estimator of fecundity slope, length of reproductive season, or latitude). However, evolutionary shifts in clutch size explain less than 8% of the associated change in SSD, which also varies significantly in the absence of evolutionary shifts in reproductive frequency and mode. A multiple regression model retained territoriality and clutch size as significant predictors of SSD, but only 16% of the variation in SSD is explained using these variables. Intrasexual selection for large male size and fecundity selection for large female size have undoubtedly helped to shape patterns of SSD across lizards, but the comparative data at present provide only weak support for these hypotheses as general explanations for SSD in this group. Future work would benefit from the consideration of alternatives to these traditional evolutionary hypotheses, and the elucidation of proximate mechanisms influencing growth and SSD within populations.
The Deployment of Visual Attention: Two Surprises

Abstract : The visual system is not capable of processing of all aspects of a scene in parallel. While some visual information can be extracted from all locations at once, other processes, including object recognition, are severely limited in their capacity. Selective attention is used to limit the operation of these limited-capacity processes to one (or, perhaps, a few) objects at a time. Searching for a target in a scene, therefore, requires deployment of attention from one candidate target to the next until the target is found or the search is abandoned. Common sense suggests that distractor objects that have been rejected as targets are marked in some fashion to prevent redeployment of attention to non-target items. Introspection suggests that sustained attention to a scene builds up a perception of that scene in which more and more objects are simultaneously recognized. Neither common-sense nor introspection are correct in this case. Evidence suggests that covert attention is deployed at random among candidate targets without regard to the prior history of the search. Rejected distractors are not marked during a search. Prior to the arrival of attention, visual features are loosely bundled into objects. Attention is required to bind features into a recognizable object. For an object to be recognized, there must be a link between a visual representation and a representation in memory. Our data suggest that only one such link can be maintained at one moment in time. Hence, counter to introspection, only one object is recognized at one time. These surprising limits on our abilities may be based on a trade off speed for apparent efficiency.
Differential equations with general highly oscillatory forcing terms

The concern of this paper is in expanding and computing initial-value problems of the form y′=f(y)+hω(t), where the function hω oscillates rapidly for ω≫1. Asymptotic expansions for such equations are well understood in the case of modulated Fourier oscillators and they can be used as an organizing principle for very accurate and affordable numerical solvers. However, there is no similar theory for more general oscillators, and there are sound reasons to believe that approximations of this kind are unsuitable in that setting. We follow in this paper an alternative route, demonstrating that, for a much more general family of oscillators, e.g. linear combinations of functions of the form eiωgk(t), it is possible to expand y(t) in a different manner. Each rth term in the expansion is for some ς>0 and it can be represented as an r-dimensional highly oscillatory integral. Because computation of multivariate highly oscillatory integrals is fairly well understood, this provides a powerful method for an effective discretization of a numerical solution for a large family of highly oscillatory ordinary differential equations.
Evaluation of antibacterial activity of Prosopis juliflora (SW.) DC. leaves.

BACKGROUND The ethnobotanical importance of Prosopis juliflora is well-known in the folkloric system of medicine for the treatment of various ailments. Although, the study related to the antibacterial potential of this plant, from Central India is scanty. MATERIAL AND METHODS The in vitro antibacterial activity of Prosopis juliflora leaves collected from the local area was evaluated against ten bacterial type cultures by agar well diffusion assay. The crude extracts prepared by two methods separately with three different solvents were examined for the preliminary antibacterial activity and phytochemical screening, the results of which were used for the choice of solvent and mass extraction of crude extract. Solvent fractionation of crude extract was done employing two sets of solvents namely Set-PCE and Set-HDB which resulted in total, six organic and two aqueous fractions, which were finally subjected to antibacterial activities. RESULTS Varying degrees of growth inhibition was shown by all the fractions against tested microorganisms. The highest antibacterial activity was observed in aqueous fractions as compared to solvent fractions. CONCLUSION Isolation and characterization of the bioactive components can be further done by systematic screening of the most active solvent fraction which could lead to the possible source of new antibacterial agents.
A NOVEL HEURISTIC BASED CLUSTERING FOR MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a set of mobile nodes that are infrastructure-less and capable of functioning without the existence of centralized co-ordination. MANETs are helpful in places that have no infrastructure for communications or when that infrastructure is destroyed. The constrained resources in the ad hoc networks have made designing of an efficient and reliable routing a very challenging problem. A smart routing is required to efficiently make use of these constrained resources and also adapting to the dynamic nature of the network. Clustering is one of the approaches for regulating the routing process. Partitioning the network into number of interconnected substructures is called clustering and those substructures are called clusters. The dynamic and unstable nature of the mobile nodes makes it difficult for the cluster formation and constrained resources restrict the determination of clusterheads for each cluster. A large number of approaches have been proposed for the election of clusterheads. In this paper, a new method has been proposed for clusterhead selection using geometric mean by considering multiple factors. The simulation results prove that the proposed method results stable clusters with lower clusterhead change rate and re-affiliation rate than other existing algorithms.
The Civic Labor of Online Moderators

Volunteer moderators of online platforms have done fundamental work to foster social relations for over forty years. Moderators create, support, and control public discourse for millions of people, even as their uncompensated labor upholds platform funding models. In this paper, I examine the “civic labor” of moderators on the social news platform reddit, where a strike by over two thousand subreddit communities in July 2015 forced the company to meet their demands. Scholarship on volunteer moderation has tended to view this work as digital labor, civic participation, or oligarchy. In mixed-methods research with over 52,000 subreddits and over a dozen interviews, I show how the everyday meanings of moderation work are negotiated as moderators face the platform, their communities, and other moderators alike. In disputes over moderator decisions, in the process of choosing moderators, and in the governance of wider networks of many subreddits, moderators must manage their position with all three stakeholders. I also show how the recognition of this civic labor brings clarity to complex moments of collective action like the reddit blackout. Volunteer governance continues to be a common approach to managing social relations, conﬂict, and civil liberties online. Our ability to recognize the nature of moderation work will shape our capacity to address those challenges as a society.
K-Tracer: A System for Extracting Kernel Malware Behavior

Kernel rootkits can provide user level-malware programs with the additional capabilities of hiding their malicious activities by altering the legitimate kernel behavior of an operating system. While existing research has studied rootkit hooking behavior in an effort to help develop defense and remediation mechanisms, automated analysis of the actual malicious goals and capabilities of rootkits has not been adequately investigated. In this paper, we present an approach based on a combination of backward slicing and chopping techniques that enables automatic discovery of the system data manipulation behaviors of rootkits. We have built a system called K-Tracer that can dynamically analyze Windows kernel-level code and extract malicious behaviors from rootkits, including sensitive data access, modification and triggers. Our system overcomes several challenges of analyzing the Windows Kernel. We have performed experiments on several kernel malware samples and shown that our system can successfully extract all malicious data manipulation behaviors from them. We also discuss the limitations of our current system on newer rootkit strategies, and provide insight into how it can be extended to handle these
University of California Riverside Twig Queries over Multiversion Xml Documents Abstract of the Thesis Twig Queries over Multiversion Xml Documents

OF THE THESIS Twig Queries Over Multiversion XML Documents by Adam Woss Master of Science, Graduate Program in Computer Science University of California, Riverside, November 2008 Dr. Committee Chair, Chairperson Over the last few years XML has emerged as the standard for semi-structured data and exchange over the Internet. In recent years, a number of approaches have been proposed for storing the evolution of XML documents, thereby preserving useful temporal information. However, relatively little research has been done to adapt current XML querying techniques to take advantage of the temporal information being preserved. In this thesis, we discuss the design and development of a unified approach for temporal queries over multiversion XML documents. Specifically, we examine the aspects of managing the document over time and the algorithm used to carry out a query.
An Optimization Algorithm for UBIFS Wear-Leveling

This paper presents an optimization algorithm for UBIFS wear-leveling. After introducing UBIFS architecture and analyzing wear-leveling and its protection mechanism, we show the shortcomings of the protection mechanism and give a way to improve it. We present an optimization algorithm with two key ideas: to accumulate write requests by building a queue and to balance the amount of data movement by reserving LEBs. This algorithm focuses on minimizing the waiting time and space overhead. The evaluation result shows that our optimization algorithm saves at least 52% of waiting time for wear-leveling and reduces approximately 33.3% of space overhead for each LEB.
Obsessive-compulsive inventory and obsessive-compulsive inventory-revised scales: translation into brazilian portuguese and cross-cultural adaptation.

OBJECTIVE The present study describes the process of translation into Brazilian Portuguese and the cross-cultural adaptation of the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory and the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised scales. The Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory was developed with the purpose of measuring the intensity of the various symptoms that characterize the obsessive-compulsive disorder, assessing their frequency and the distress they caused during the previous month, as well as estimating the overall severity of the disorder. Thus, different levels of severity among different obsessions and compulsions can be assessed and compared. METHOD The scales were initially translated into Brazilian Portuguese by two bilingual psychiatrists and then independently back-translated by other two bilingual psychiatrists. The scales were then applied to 15 obsessive-compulsive disorder patients, deliberately chosen from different educational levels, to make language adjustments. The author accepted the final version of the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory and the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised scales after their back translation. RESULTS The scales were easily understood and filled in by individuals and may be used with obsessive-compulsive disorder patients of different socioeconomic levels. CONCLUSION The Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory and the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised scales, in their Brazilian Portuguese version, can help health professionals to screen potential obsessive-compulsive disorder patients, assess the severity of obsessive-compulsive symptoms and reduce these symptoms using different treatments.
Surgical Suites' Operations Management

Surgical suites are a key driver of a hospital's costs, revenues, and utilization of postoperative resources such as beds. This article describes some commonly occurring operations management problems faced by the managers of surgical suites. For three of these problems, the article also provides preliminary models and possible solution approaches. Its goal is to identify open challenges to spur further research by the operations management community on an important class of problems that have not received adequate attention in the literature, despite their economic importance.
The ZRTP Protocol Security Considerations

ZRTP is draft of key agreement protocol by Phil Zimmermann, which relies on a Diffie-Hellman exchange to generate SRTP session parameters, providing confidentiality and protecting against Man-in-the-Middle attacks even without a public key infrastructure or endpoint certificates. This is an analysis of the protocol performed with AVISPA and ProVerif, which tests security properties of ZRTP; in order to perform the analysis, the protocol has been modeled in HLPSL (for AVISPA) and in the applied π-calculus (for Proverif). An improvement to gather some extra resistance against Man-in-the-Middle attacks is also proposed. PROTOCOL OVERVIEW ZRTP is a protocol for media path Diffie-Hellman exchange to agree on a session key and parameters for establishing SRTP sessions. This protocol does not rely on a public key infrastructure or on certification authorities, in fact ephimeral Diffie-Hellman keys are generated on each session establishment: this allows to bypass the complexity of creating and mantaining a complex third trusted party. These keys will contribute to the generation of the session key and parameters for SRTP sessions, along with previously shared secrets: this gives protection against Man-in-theMiddle attacks, assuming the attacker was not present in the first session between the two endpoints. To ensure that the attacker is indeed not present in the first session (when no shared secrets exist), the Short Authentication String method is used: the two endpoint compare a value by reading it aloud. In case the two values match, then no Man-in-the-Middle attack has been performed. Call Flow In the call flow of the protocol, two roles can be identified: initiator (Alice) and responder (Bob). The parties exchange ZRTP messages, which are enclosed in a frame that makes ZRTP packets clearly distinguishable from RTP ones, thus maintaining backward compatibility with clients which do not support ZRTP. 1 Actually, at the time of this writing, ZRTP is still a draft of protocol. 2 SRTP has not been projected to perform this task, so it has to rely on external key management protocols. The CRC included in the frame is more reliable than the one built-in in UDP, thus reducing the chances of mistaking a transmission error for an attack. Each message starts with a preamble containing information about the message length (including preamble length, 1 word). RTP Session Establishment The key agreement is performed via an RTP session, which is established through a signaling protocol such as SIP. The signaling protocol passes the signaling secret (sigs), which is the hash of the concatenation of Call-ID, to tag and from tag: this is a secret because Call-ID is random-generated, but only if the SIP session is secure (usually data is transmitted through a TLS channel). The signaling also provides the SRTP secret (srtps), which is the hash of SRTP master key and salt. Key Agreement – Diffie-Hellman Mode The key agreement algorithm can be divided into 4 steps:
On paths, trails and closed trails in edge-colored graphs

In this paper we deal from an algorithmic perspective with different questions regarding properly edge-colored (or PEC) paths, trails and closed trails. Given a c-edge-colored graph G(c), we show how to polynomially determine, if any, a PEC closed trail subgraph whose number of visits at each vertex is specified before hand. As a consequence, we solve a number of interesting related problems. For instance, given subset S of vertices in G(c), we show how to maximize in polynomial time the number of S-restricted vertex (resp., edge) disjoint PEC paths (resp., trails) in G(c) with endpoints in S. Further, if G(c) contains no PEC closed trails, we show that the problem of finding a PEC s-t trail visiting a given subset of vertices can be solved in polynomial time and prove that it becomes NP-complete if we are restricted to graphs with no PEC cycles. We also deal with graphs G(c) containing no (almost) PEC cycles or closed trails through s or t. We prove that finding 2 PEC s-t paths (resp., trails) with length at most L > 0 is NP-complete in the strong sense even for graphs with maximum degree equal to 3 and present an approximation algorithm for computing k vertex (resp., edge) disjoint PEC s-t paths (resp., trails) so that the maximum path (resp., trail) length is no more than k times the PEC path (resp., trail) length in an optimal solution. Further, we prove that finding 2 vertex disjoint s-t paths with exactly one PEC s-t path is NP-complete. This result is interesting since as proved in Abouelaoualim et. al.(2008), the determination of two or more vertex disjoint PEC s-t paths can be done in polynomial time. Finally, if G(c) is an arbitrary c-edge-colored graph with maximum vertex degree equal to four, we prove that finding two monochromatic vertex disjoint s-t paths with different colors is NP-complete. We also propose some related problems.
PAR reduction in space-time coded OFDM via modified active constellation extension

High peak-to-average ratio (PAR) is one of the main problems in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. This problem becomes more complicated when space-time codes (STC) are employed as any PAR reduction method should not destroy the relationships among STC encoded OFDM symbols. There are existing PAR reduction methods for STC-OFDM systems. However, these methods do not provide sufficient performance of PAR reduction without complex receivers. In this paper, we propose Modified Active Constellation Extension (Modified ACE) method for STC encoded OFDM systems to provide 3.5 dB of PAR improvement at a 10-3 complementary cumulative density function (CCDF) of PAR. Most importantly, Modified ACE does not require any complex receivers or side information.
Building a Learning Object Content Management System

While the educational technology community is rife with learning object-based specifications, tools for supporting these specifications (both at an authoring and at a delivery level) are patchy at best. This paper outlines our experiences over the last two years in building a suite of tools to deploy an online course based primarily on IMS specifications. These tools include a learning object sequencing environment, a content delivery engine, and an assessment application. Finally, this paper outlines areas where specification and tool support could use improvement, based on research conducted from members of our lab over the last decade or so.
Memristive based oscillatory associative and dynamic memories

The aim of the work is to develop theoretical methodologies and numerical techniques for the analysis and design of systems composed of memristive oscillators. In particular, we focus on networks made up of nonlinear oscillators with or without memristors interacting through resistive and/or memristive 'synapses'. Such methodologies will play a fundamental role in the realization of Neuromorphic Memristive Oscillatory Networks for pattern recognition tasks.
Ethnicity, reception and the growth of American immigration

ABSTRACT Deportation has always been a feature of the American political, social and economic discourse. A twin effect of immigration, deportation concerns who is granted the right to stay and who is removed from the country. Amid the growing debate on reform, this essay casts light on the changing nature of deportation law during the last century. Paying attention to the reception which immigrants receive and the perceptions of threat and economic competition which natives often perceive, this work evaluates how policy has shifted in response to the changing face of newcomers. As immigration law becomes intertwined with criminal law, so do the stipulations governing entry and exit. Within a politically charged social space, American immigration is a story punctuated with racialized and criminalized images of immigrants. Bridging ethnic and racial currents, this work seeks to understand how these effects continue to shape contemporary immigration policy.
Eurographics/ Ieee-vgtc Symposium on Visualization 2009 Visualization of Vessel Movements

We propose a geographical visualization to support operators of coastal surveillance systems and decision making analysts to get insights in vessel movements. For a possibly unknown area, they want to know where significant maritime areas, like highways and anchoring zones, are located. We show these features as an overlay on a map. As source data we use AIS data: Many vessels are currently equipped with advanced GPS devices that frequently sample the state of the vessels and broadcast them. Our visualization is based on density fields that are derived from convolution of the dynamic vessel positions with a kernel. The density fields are shown as illuminated height maps. Combination of two fields, with a large and small kernel provides overview and detail. A large kernel provides an overview of area usage revealing vessel highways. Details of speed variations of individual vessels are shown with a small kernel, highlighting anchoring zones where multiple vessels stop. Besides for maritime applications we expect that this approach is useful for the visualization of moving object data in general.