Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Workload-driven adaptive data partitioning and distribution — The Cumulus approach

Cloud environments usually feature several geographically distributed data centers. In order to increase the scalability of applications, many Cloud providers partition data and distribute these partitions across data centers to balance the load. However, if the partitions are not carefully chosen, it might lead to distributed transactions. This is particularly expensive when applications require strong consistency guarantees. The additional synchronization needed for atomic commitment would strongly impact transaction throughput and could even completely undo the gain that can be achieved by load balancing. Hence, it is beneficial to avoid distributed transactions as much as possible by partitioning the data in such a way that transactions can be executed locally. As access patterns of characteristic transaction workloads may change over time, the partitioning also needs to be dynamically updated. In this paper we introduce Cumulus, an adaptive data partitioning approach which is able to identify characteristic access patterns of transaction mixes, to determine data partitions based on these patterns, and to dynamically re-partition data if the access patterns change. In the evaluation based on the TPC-C benchmark, we show that Cumulus significantly increases the overall system performance in an OLTP setting compared to static data partitioning approaches. Moreover, we show that Cumulus is able to adapt to workload shifts at runtime by generating partitions that match the actual workload and to re-configure the system on the fly.
Enhance Performance of Content Delivery Network using Provider Oriented Hierarchical Corporative Proposal

Content Delivery Network (CDN) has become increasingly popular over the past decade with the expectation to provide a better performance and a more scalable, reliable and available content delivery. This can be achieved by delivering the content from caches which are located closer to the end-users than the original server. However, the performance of CDN system is affected by the collaboration among CDN servers. This paper proposes a collaborative caching among CDN servers known as provider oriented hierarchical cooperative content outsourcing (POHC). To highlight the advantages of this propose, a mathematic analytical model is given to compare with the non-cooperative pull-based content outsourcing (Non-CPB). OMNeT++ software is used for simulation in order to verify the result of the analytical model. The consequence from the analytical model matched well with the result from the simulative experiment in term of packet loss, better reliability and less bandwidth consumption versus the Non-CPB mode. After collecting relevant status of all CDN servers in online network, this paper uses DBSPT-Circular-PO algorithm to build POHC with root, which is the content provider.
Roles of the Carboxy-Terminal Half of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Major Outer Membrane Protein OprF in Cell Shape, Growth in Low-Osmolarity Medium, and Peptidoglycan Association

ABSTRACT OprF, the major outer membrane protein of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is multifunctional in that it can act as a nonspecific porin, plays a role in the maintenance of cell shape, and is required for growth in a low-osmolarity environment. The latter two structural roles of OprF, and OprF’s association with the peptidoglycan, have been proposed to be localized in the carboxy terminus of the protein, based on this region’s similarity to members of the OmpA family of proteins. To determine if this is correct, we constructed a series of C-terminally truncated OprF derivatives and examined their effects on P. aeruginosa cell length and growth in low-osmolarity medium. While the C terminus of OprF was required for wild-type cell length and growth in low-osmolarity medium, expression of the N terminus (first 163 amino acids [aa]) also influenced these phenotypes (compared with OprF deficiency). The first 154 to 164 aa of OprF seemed required for stable protein expression, consistent with the existence of a β-barrel domain in the N terminus of OprF. Greater than 215 aa of the protein were required for strong peptidoglycan association, confirming that residues in the C-terminal end of OprF are required for peptidoglycan binding. OprF deficiency did not affect the in vivo growth of an OprF-deficient strain in a mouse chamber model. Collectively, these data suggest that the C terminus of OprF plays a role in cell length, growth of P. aeruginosa in low-osmolarity media (but not in vivo), and peptidoglycan association, while the N terminus has an influence on the first two characteristics and is additionally important for stable protein expression.
Associations among Substance Use, Mental Health Disorders, and Self-Harm in a Prison Population: Examining Group Risk for Suicide Attempt

Substance use disorders (SUD) and mental health disorders are significant public health issues that co-occur and are associated with high risk for suicide attempts. SUD and mental health disorders are more prevalent among offenders (i.e., prisoners or inmates) than the non-imprisoned population, raising concerns about the risk of self-harm. This cross-sectional study examined the population of a state prison system (10,988 out of 13,079) to identify associations among SUD (alcohol, cannabis, intravenous drugs, narcotics, and tobacco smoking), mental health disorders (anxiety, bipolar, depression, and psychotic disorders), and suicide attempts. The primary aim was to determine which groups (SUD, mental health disorders, and co-occurrences) were strongly association with suicide attempts. Groups with a documented SUD or mental health disorders compared to peers without these issues had 2.0 and 9.2 greater odds, respectively, for attempting suicide, which was significant at p < 0.0001 for both conditions. There were also significant differences within SUD and mental health disorders groups in regard to suicide attempts. Groups with the greatest odds for suicide attempts were offenders with comorbid bipolar comorbid and anxiety, alcohol combined with depression, and cannabis co-occurring with depression. Documentation of suicide attempts during imprisonment indicates awareness, but also suggest a need to continue enhancing screening and evaluating environmental settings.
Monitoring Instruction-based Intrusion Detection and Self-healing System

Anomaly-based Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPSs) currently protect systems from zero-day attacks. However, since they either only inform administrators about the intrusions and/or just stop services or systems, they cannot stably continue services until the vulnerabilities are fixed by security patches. So self-healing systems (SHSs) are needed because they continue to safely execute services even if the applications have vulnerabilities. However since most SHSs rely on execution flows, e.g., system-call and library-function sequences, these systems cannot recover from non-controldata attacks. Such attacks target data that are not related with execution flow: user inputs, configuration data, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel SHS named RIN, Reactive INstruction-level recovery system, that uses instruction level rules for detection and recovery. RIN detects the falsifications of most data used in target applications and repairs them. We implemented RIN and evaluated it. The results show that it has sufficient functionality to find and fix the vulnerabilities for a function pointer and non-control-data.
DNA Analysis Indicates That Asian Elephants Are Native to Borneo and Are Therefore a High Priority for Conservation

The origin of Borneo's elephants is controversial. Two competing hypotheses argue that they are either indigenous, tracing back to the Pleistocene, or were introduced, descending from elephants imported in the 16th–18th centuries. Taxonomically, they have either been classified as a unique subspecies or placed under the Indian or Sumatran subspecies. If shown to be a unique indigenous population, this would extend the natural species range of the Asian elephant by 1300 km, and therefore Borneo elephants would have much greater conservation importance than if they were a feral population. We compared DNA of Borneo elephants to that of elephants from across the range of the Asian elephant, using a fragment of mitochondrial DNA, including part of the hypervariable d-loop, and five autosomal microsatellite loci. We find that Borneo's elephants are genetically distinct, with molecular divergence indicative of a Pleistocene colonisation of Borneo and subsequent isolation. We reject the hypothesis that Borneo's elephants were introduced. The genetic divergence of Borneo elephants warrants their recognition as a separate evolutionary significant unit. Thus, interbreeding Borneo elephants with those from other populations would be contraindicated in ex situ conservation, and their genetic distinctiveness makes them one of the highest priority populations for Asian elephant conservation.
Putting a new spin on CNS events in children with sickle cell anemia

A lthough the molecular abnormality in homozygous sickle cell (SS) anemia arises from a single amino acid substitution of valine for glutamic acid at position six of the hemoglobin b chain, the pathophysiologic consequences for the child with SS anemia are complex and often multifactorial. The CNS is one of the organ systems most frequently affected in children with SS anemia, with a reported incidence of stroke of 5–7% [1], with an additional 21.8% having ‘‘silent infarcts’’ detected by MRI [2]. Cognitive abnormalities have also been observed in SS anemia patients who have normal neuroimaging studies [3]. In this issue of Pediatric Blood & Cancer, Helton et al. [4] utilized pulsed arterial spin labeled perfusion techniques to measure CSF blood flow in a cohort of 21 children with SS anemia. None of the cohort had a history of an overt clinical neurological event, although imaging studies were obtained for several patients because of a history of declining school performance. MRI segmentation techniques were also performed to measure cerebral blood flow in areas of gray matter, white matter, and abnormal white matter. In contrast to previously published reports of increased gray matter cerebral blood flow in children with SS anemia [5,6], Helton et al. describe relatively normal gray matter cerebral blood flow in their predominantly (18 of 21 subjects) hydroxyurea treated cohort. The mean hemoglobin concentration of 9.2 g/dl present in subjects on the current study may in part explain the observed differences in gray matter cerebral blood flow. What is the relationship of cerebral blood flow to CNS abnormalities in SS anemia? Multiple factors contribute to the end result of CNS injury in children with SS anemia. Arterial wall structural changes antedate the development of large vessel occlusion in children with SS anemia with stroke. Although the presence of silent infarcts in children with SS anemia is an independent risk factor for stroke [7], observed discordance in some children between large vessel abnormalities and the development of microinfarcts [8] suggests the possibility of different etiologies of CNS injury. In addition to vascular occlusion by sickled erythrocytes, potential mechanisms contributing to CNS vasculopathy and injury in children with SS anemia include the following, among others:
Fuzzy C-Means based Inference Mechanism for Association Rule Mining: A Clinical Data Mining Approach

Association rule mining has wide variety of research in the field of data mining, many of association rule mining approaches are well investigated in literature, but the major issue with ARM is, huge number of frequent patterns cannot produce direct knowledge or factual knowledge, hence to find factual knowledge and to discover inference, we propose a novel approach AFIRM in this paper followed by two step procedure, first is to discover frequent pattern by Appling ARM algorithm and second is to discover inference by adopting the concept of Fuzzy c-means clustering, for performance analysis, we apply this approach on a clinical dataset (contained symptoms information of patients) and we got highly effected disease in a couple of months or in a session as hidden knowledge or inference.
Progressive damage on high resolution computed tomography despite stable lung function in cystic fibrosis

For effective clinical management of cystic fibrosis (CF) lung disease it is important to closely monitor the start and progression of lung damage. The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) scoring systems and pulmonary function tests (PFT) to detect changes in lung disease. CF children (n=48) had two HRCT scans in combination with two PFT 2 yrs apart. Their scans were scored using five scoring systems (Castile, Brody, Helbich, Santamaria and Bhalla). “Sensitivity” was defined as the ability to detect disease progression. In this group of children, HRCT scores worsened. PFT remained unchanged or improved. Of the HRCT parameters, mucous plugging and the severity, extent and peripheral extension of bronchiectasis worsened significantly. Relationships between changes in HRCT scores and PFT were weak. Substantial structural lung damage was evident in some children who had normal lung function. These data show that high-resolution computed tomography is more sensitive than pulmonary function tests in the detection of early and progressive lung disease, and suggest that high-resolution computed tomography may be useful in the follow up of cystic fibrosis children and as an outcome measure in studies that aim to reduce lung damage.
TMTO attacks on stream ciphers – theory and practice

This paper deals with issues related to a cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off (TMTO) attacks on stream ciphers. We describe the basic theory and principles of TMTO attacks and their practical application on selected stream ciphers – namely on A5/1 cipher that is used in GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) standard. We focus mainly on the pre-computation phase of TMTO attacks. This phase includes data pre-computation and construction of various types of Hellman or Rainbow tables. The goal of the pre-computation is to cover some percentage of the key space with specially constructed chains. Our results demonstrate the real impact of various table parameters and chain constructions and show a substantial difference between theory and practice.
Risk of mortality by histologic type of breast cancer among women aged 50 to 79 years.

BACKGROUND Recent studies suggest that the use of combined estrogen and progestin hormone replacement therapy is associated with an increased risk of invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC), but that it has little association with risk of invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC). Also, the incidence rates of ILC have risen over the past 10 years while those of IDC have remained constant. Differences in survival rates by histologic types of tumor have been reported, but few of the published studies were population based or had adequate power to address this issue. METHODS We conducted a retrospective cohort study spanning the years 1974 through 1998 using data from the 9 cancer registries that have participated in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program since 1974. The cohort consisted of 164 958 women aged 50 to 79 years who had been diagnosed as having 1 of 7 histologic types of invasive breast cancer. Risks of mortality due to any cause were estimated using the Cox proportional hazards model. RESULTS Women with ILC had a risk of mortality 11% lower than women with IDC. The magnitude of this difference has increased over the past 10 years and, from 1994 through 1998, the risk of mortality was 26% lower for women with ILC. Also, the risk of mortality was between 8% and 34% lower in women with mucinous carcinoma, comedocarcinoma, or medullary, tubular, and papillary carcinomas compared with women with IDC. CONCLUSIONS Differences in prognosis by histologic type of breast cancer were identified. The survival rate of women 50 to 79 years old who have ILC, the cancer whose histologic type is the most closely linked with the use of combined estrogen and progestin hormone replacement therapy, is more favorable than that of women with IDC and appears to be improving over time.
Children's Sensitivity to Comprehension Failure in Interpreting a Nonliteral Use of an Utterance.

ACKERMAN, BRIAN P. Children's Sensitivity to Comprehension Failure in Interpreting a Nonliteral Use of an Utterance. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 485-497. The goal of this study was to determine if 7and 10-year-old children and adults are sensitive to their own and another listener's failure to understand literal and nonliteral (i.e., sarcastic) uses of utterances. In 3 experiments, subjects listened to stories containing either a literal or nonliteral utterance and a story listener's response to that utterance. Subjects' interpretations of the speaker's meaning and judgments of whether they had understood the utterance were assessed independently immediately after utterance presentation in Experiments 1 and 3 and after the listener's response in Experiment 2. Evaluation of the listener's understanding was assessed after the listener's response in all 3 experiments. In addition, context and intonation cues about the speaker's intent were manipulated concurrently in Experiments 1 and 2 and independently in Experiment 3. The results showed that the children had good understanding of the speaker's nonliteral intent based primarily on context cues and were quite sensitive to instances of their own incomprehension. However, the 7-year-olds did not evaluate the listener's understanding effectively. One of the problems here probably was that the children did not use their own interpretations of the speaker's intent as a monitoring or evaluative standard.
Exploring the Limits of Domain Model Recovery

We are interested in re-engineering families of legacy applications towards using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). Is it worth to invest in harvesting domain knowledge from the source code of legacy applications? Reverse engineering domain knowledge from source code is sometimes considered very hard or even impossible. Is it also difficult for "modern legacy systems"? In this paper we select two open-source applications and answer the following research questions: which parts of the domain are implemented by the application, and how much can we manually recover from the source code? To explore these questions, we compare manually recovered domain models to a reference model extracted from domain literature, and measured precision and recall. The recovered models are accurate: they cover a significant part of the reference model and they do not contain much junk. We conclude that domain knowledge is recoverable from "modern legacy" code and therefore domain model recovery can be a valuable component of a domain re-engineering process.
Transcriptional autoregulation by quorum sensing Escherichia coli regulators B and C (QseBC) in enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC)

The cell‐to‐cell communication system referred to as quorum sensing (QS) is based on the principle that bacteria secrete hormone‐like compounds referred to as autoinducers. Upon reaching a threshold concentration, these autoinducers interact with transcription factors to regulate gene expression. We previously reported that enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC), which is responsible for outbreaks of bloody diarrhoea, utilizes a QS system to regulate gene transcription. We have also previously shown that the quorum sensing E. coli regulators B and C (QseBC) may act as a two‐component system to transcriptionally regulate the expression of flagella and motility. Here, using a reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR), we show that qseBC are transcribed in an operon. Furthermore, using a qseBC::lacZ transcriptional fusion, we observed that QseB autoactivates its own transcription. In addition, the transcriptional start site of the qseBC promoter responsive to QseBC was mapped, and single‐copy and multicopy deletion analyses were performed to determine the minimal region necessary for QseB transcriptional activation. These data allowed us to map an additional transcriptional start site for the qseBC promoter which may allow for a basal level of QseBC expression. Finally, electrophoretic mobility shift assays, competition experiments and DNase I footprints were performed and demonstrated that QseB directly binds to two sites in its own promoter. These results indicate that QseB may act to autoregulate its own transcription through binding to low‐ and high‐affinity sites found in its promoter.
Lack of β2-adrenoceptors aggravates heart failure-induced skeletal muscle myopathy in mice

Skeletal myopathy is a hallmark of heart failure (HF) and has been associated with a poor prognosis. HF and other chronic degenerative diseases share a common feature of a stressed system: sympathetic hyperactivity. Although beneficial acutely, chronic sympathetic hyperactivity is one of the main triggers of skeletal myopathy in HF. Considering that β2‐adrenoceptors mediate the activity of sympathetic nervous system in skeletal muscle, we presently evaluated the contribution of β2‐adrenoceptors for the morphofunctional alterations in skeletal muscle and also for exercise intolerance induced by HF. Male WT and β2‐adrenoceptor knockout mice on a FVB genetic background (β2KO) were submitted to myocardial infarction (MI) or SHAM surgery. Ninety days after MI both WT and β2KO mice presented to cardiac dysfunction and remodelling accompanied by significantly increased norepinephrine and epinephrine plasma levels, exercise intolerance, changes towards more glycolytic fibres and vascular rarefaction in plantaris muscle. However, β2KO MI mice displayed more pronounced exercise intolerance and skeletal myopathy when compared to WT MI mice. Skeletal muscle atrophy of infarcted β2KO mice was paralleled by reduced levels of phosphorylated Akt at Ser 473 while increased levels of proteins related with the ubiquitin‐–proteasome system, and increased 26S proteasome activity. Taken together, our results suggest that lack of β2‐adrenoceptors worsen and/or anticipate the skeletal myopathy observed in HF.
Student perceptions: Improving the educational experiences of high school students on the autism spectrum

Listening to and reflecting on the voices and personal stories of adolescent students with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is critically important to developing more inclusive approaches to their education. This article considers the experiences of nine adolescents with an ASD on their inclusive education in a large urban secondary school in Australia. These educational experiences were mapped onto four themes emanating from a similar study by Humphrey and Lewis from the United Kingdom. The results from both studies suggest that although students with ASD are having positive and enabling educational experiences, a number of common inhibitors continue to prevent them from taking full advantage of their schooling. By listening to the voices of students with ASD, specific enablers and inhibitors to promoting successful educational experiences are identified, and recommendations for practice are put forward to better support the education not only of students with ASD but all students.