Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Author ' s personal copy Bone graphs : Medial shape parsing and abstraction

The recognition of 3-D objects from their silhouettes demands a shape representation which is stable with respect to minor changes in viewpoint and articulation. This can be achieved by parsing a silhouette into parts and relationships that do not change across similar object views. Medial descriptions, such as skeletons and shock graphs, provide part-based decompositions but suffer from instabilities. As a result, similar shapes may be represented by dissimilar part sets. We propose a novel shape parsing approach which is based on identifying and regularizing the ligature structure of a medial axis, leading to a bone graph, a medial abstraction which captures a more stable notion of an object’s parts. Our experiments show that it offers improved recognition and pose estimation performance in the presence of within-class deformation over the shock graph. 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Paging Method Switching for QEMU-KVM Guest Machine

Shadow and nested paging are two means to enable the memory access for a VM guest. Although the nested paging can eliminate the need of vmexit due to frequent guest page faults, new form of overhead is meanwhile introduced by the two dimensional page table walking. Even TLB is employed as a quick reference in the address translation, the performance gained may in a certain cases still be offset by the new overhead. The fact is, each method is only capable for handling a subset of the whole workloads, neither approach is guaranteed to win the race and deliver the best performance for all types of the workloads. A possible attempt is to enable the VMM to reconfigure its paging method at run-time as a response to the ever changing behavior of the workloads in memory accessing. We describe the design of this mechanism, and part of the implementation based on the QEMU-KVM virtual machine monitor.
AN ADAPTIVE SECURITY SCHEME FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

-Message Authentication is a short piece of the information used authenticate a message to provide integrity and authenticity assurance on message. Integrity assurance detects accidental and intentional message changes while authenticity assurance affirms the message's origin. It is one of the effective ways prevent unauthorized and computed messages from being forwarded in wireless sensor networks (WSN). For this reason, Symmetric-key or public-key crypsystem have been developed. However, it has some limitations, like lack of scalability and node compromise attacks. Polynomial-based scheme was introduced to address these issues. This scheme and its extensions also have a thickness of a built-in threshold problem. When the number of messages transmitted is larger than the threshold. While enabling intermediate node authentication, scalable authentication scheme of the elliptic curve cryptography that allows any node transmit an unlimited number of messages without suffering the threshold problem. Proposed scheme is give the strong source privacy and security while improve the sending packet ratio speed and Packet Arrivaling Performance by using Doomsday Algorithm.
Nonprofit Governance, Organizational Purposiveness and Design

The final article published in this Special Issue on nonprofit governance provides a platform for myself as the guest editor in two ways: both to reflect in a Postscript on the editorial process in which I became involved since posting a call for papers, as well as to write this Foreword that helps readers to become engaged in a meaningful discourse with the contributing authors. Incongruous as it may appear to be, I begin with the Postscript , as the Introductory Note to the Special Issue is not meant to integrate the articles published into a consistent concluding argument, but rather to evaluate my role ex post and at the same time to reveal to readers ex ante the premises based on which as guest-editor I selected articles for this Special Issue on nonprofit governance. [. ]
IDENTITY, COMMUNITY, AND AUDIENCE: HOW WHOLLY OWNED FOREIGN SUBSIDIARIES GAIN LEGITIMACY IN CHINA

Conceptualizing different foreign entry modes as distinct organizational forms, we examine how wholly owned foreign subsidiaries (WOFSs) gain legitimacy in a host country. Drawing on the institutional and ecological perspectives, we build a legitimation framework based on the ideas of identity, community, and audience. Specifically, we identify dual sources of legitimating influences for these subsidiaries in China in 1979–95: foreign direct investment (FDI) communities, and host country public opinion. Our findings reveal that the legitimation and competition dynamics of FDI communities and Chinese acceptance of the organizational form both influenced adoption of wholly owned foreign subsidiaries in China.
Rules, Relations, and Work1

Classic theory is ambiguous regarding what is most meaningful for workers and workplaces. Are bureaucratic rules most consequential by providing predictability, as suggested by Weber, or problematic, owing to assaults on autonomy? And what of proximate social relations, seen as fundamental in ethnographic, resistance, and justice accounts? This article’s analyses, which draw on a unique sample of approximately 2,500 German workers across heterogeneous contexts, reveal pronounced effects of horizontal and vertical social relations on worker (i.e., satisfaction and fairness) and workplace (i.e., commitment and effort) outcomes. These effects, which hold for high- and low-status workers, exist beyond independent, mediating, or conditional associations with rules and have differing implications for women versus men. The authors discuss the importance of their findings for work, organizational, and inequality literatures and call for greater attention to relational dimensions of work-life, their frequent disconnect from bureaucratic structures, and the consequences for organizations and the individuals within.
Neurons in the Rat Anterior Cingulate Cortex Dynamically Encode Cost–Benefit in a Spatial Decision-Making Task

Optimal decision-making often requires an assessment of the costs and benefits associated with each available course of action. Previous studies have shown that lesions to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) impair cost–benefit decision-making in laboratory animals, but the neural mechanisms underlying the deficit are not well understood. We recorded from ACC neurons in freely moving rats as they performed a spatial decision-making task whereby, in the baseline configuration “2:6B,” rats could pursue two or six food pellets, the latter obtained by climbing a barrier [high cost, high reward (HCHR)]. In this configuration, the mean percentage of HCHR choices was 69 ± 4%, and a substantial portion of ACC neurons (63%) exhibited significantly higher firing for one goal trajectory versus the other; for 94% of these cells, higher firing was associated with the HCHR option. This HCHR bias was not simply attributable to the larger reward, the barrier, or behavioral preference. In intersession and intrasession manipulations involving at least one barrier (2:6B, 2B:6B, and 2:2B), ACC activity rapidly adapted and was consistently biased toward the economically advantageous option relative to the configuration. Interestingly, when only a difference in reward magnitude was presented (2:6, no barrier, HCHR choices of 84 ± 4%), ACC activity was minimal and nonbiased. One interpretation of our data is that the ACC encodes a relative, integrated cost–benefit representation of available choice options that is biased toward the “better” option in terms of effort/outcome ratio. This representation may be specifically recruited when an assessment of reward and effort is required to optimally perform a task.
Title: into the Wild: Big Data Analytics in Moral Psychology

Moral values are culturally variable entities that emerge from dynamic, hierarchical interactions between individualand group-level phenomena. Human-generated unstructured data, from sources such as social media, offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe these phenomena in a natural habitat, which is an essential vantage point for understanding moral values and their role in moral judgment and behavior.
The fusion of forensic speaker verification systems

The discriminant performance of fused forensic speaker verification systems in likelihood ratios framework was tested. Likelihood ratios were calculated using a multivariate kernel-density (MVKD) approach and the parameters used in this paper are LPC,LPCC and MFCC extracted from the Chinese vowel /a/ in the telephone recordings database, and the reliability of the fused forensic speaker verification systems was measured using the log-likelihood-ratio-cost function.
Semideenite Programming and Combinatorial Optimization

Semideenite Programs have recently turned out to be a powerful tool for approximating integer problems. To survey the development in this area over the last few years, the following topics are addressed in some detail. First, we investigate ways to derive semideenite programs from discrete optimization problems. The duality theory for semideenite programs is the key to understand algorithms to solve them. The relevant duality results are therefore summarized. The second part of the paper deals with the approximation of integer problems both in a theoretical setting, and from a computational point of view.
Probing Nitrosyl Ligation of Surface-Confined Metalloporphyrins by Inelastic Electron Tunneling Spectroscopy

Complexes obtained by the ligation of nitric oxide (NO) to metalloporphyrins represent important model systems with biological relevance. Herein we report a molecular-level investigation of surface-confined cobalt tetraphenyl porphyrin (Co-TPP) species and their interaction with NO under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. It is demonstrated that individual NO adducts can be desorbed using the atomically sharp tip of a scanning tunneling microscope, whereby a writing process is implemented for fully saturated regular metalloporphyrin arrays. The low-energy vibrational characteristics of individual Co-TPP-nitrosyl complexes probed by inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS) reveal a prominent signature at an energy of ≃31 meV. Using density functional theory-based IETS simulations—the first to be performed on such an extensive interfacial nanosystem—we succeed to reproduce the low-frequency spectrum for the NO-ligated complex and explain the absence of IETS activity for bare Co-TPP. Moreover, we can conclusively assign the IETS peak of NO-Co-TPP to a unique vibration mode involving the NO complexation site, namely, the in-plane Co–N–O rocking mode. In addition, we verify that the propensity rules previously designed on small aromatic systems and molecular fragments hold true for a metal–organic entity. This work notably permits one to envisage IETS spectroscopy as a sensitive tool to chemically characterize hybrid interfaces formed by complex metal–organic units and gaseous adducts.
Serotonin Facilitates Peripheral Pain Sensitivity in a Manner That Depends on the Nonproton Ligand Sensing Domain of ASIC3 Channel

Tissue acidosis and inflammatory mediators play critical roles in inflammatory pain. Extracellular acidosis activates acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs), which have emerged as key sensors for extracellular protons in the central and peripheral nervous systems and play key roles in pain sensation and transmission. Additionally, inflammatory mediators, such as serotonin (5-HT), are known to enhance pain sensation. However, functional interactions among protons, inflammatory mediators, and ASICs in pain sensation are poorly understood. In the present study, we show that 5-HT, a classical pro-inflammatory mediator, specifically enhances the proton-evoked sustained, but not transient, currents mediated by homomeric ASIC3 channels and heteromeric ASIC3/1a and ASIC3/1b channels. Unexpectedly, the effect of 5-HT on ASIC3 channels does not involve activation of 5-HT receptors, but is mediated via a functional interaction between 5-HT and ASIC3 channels. We further show that the effect of 5-HT on ASIC3 channels depends on the newly identified nonproton ligand sensing domain. Finally, coapplication of 5-HT and acid significantly increased pain-related behaviors as assayed by the paw-licking test in mice, which was largely attenuated in ASIC3 knock-out mice, and inhibited by the nonselective ASIC inhibitor amiloride. Together, these data identify ASIC3 channels as an unexpected molecular target for acute actions of 5-HT in inflammatory pain sensation and reveal an important role of ASIC3 channels in regulating inflammatory pain via coincident detection of extracellular protons and inflammatory mediators.
A Matter of Time: Father Involvement and Child Cognitive Outcomes

Fathers in Western countries allocate progressively more time to childcare. However, most research on how parental time inputs affect child development focuses on maternal time, and it remains empirically unclear how paternal involvement in the child’s upbringing influences child outcomes. This study provides the first systematic account of how father-child time (in total and across activity types) relates to children’s cognitive development, measured using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. In addition, it examines whether and how paternal education moderates these associations. To accomplish this, the study uses unique, longitudinal, time-diary data from an Australian sample of children aged 4-8 years (Longitudinal Study of Australian Children; n=3,273 children/6,960 observations). Results show that the total amount of father-child time is associated with small improvements in children’s cognitive functioning, whereas the amount of father-child time in educational activities is associated with moderate-to-large improvements. Such associations are similar for highly and less-highly educated fathers.
Solving an Extended Minimum Label Spanning Tree Problem to Compress Fingerprint Templates

We present a novel approach for compressing relatively small unordered data sets by means of combinatorial optimization. The application background comes from the field of biometrics, where the embedding of fingerprint template data into images by means of watermarking techniques requires extraordinary compression techniques. The approach is based on the construction of a directed tree, covering a sufficient subset of the data points. The arcs are stored via referencing a dictionary, which contains “typical” arcs w.r. t. the particular tree solution. By solving a tree-based combinatorial optimization problem we are able to find a compact representation of the input data. As optimization method we use on the one hand an exact branch-and-cut approach, and on the other hand heuristics including a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) and a memetic algorithm. Experimental results show that our method is able to achieve higher compression rates for fingerprint (minutiae) data than several standard compression algorithms.
Support vector machine classification of dimensionally reduced structural MRI images for dementia

We classify very-mild to moderate dementia in patients (CDR ranging from 0 to 2) using a support vector machine classifier acting on dimensionally reduced feature set derived from MRI brain scans of the 416 subjects available in the OASIS-Brains dataset. We use image segmentation and principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of the data. Our resulting feature set contains 11 features for each subject. Performance of the classifiers is evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation. Using linear and (gaussian) kernels, we obtain a training classification accuracy of 86.4% (90.1%), test accuracy of 85.0% (85.7%), test precision of 68.7% (68.5%), test recall of 68.0% (74.0%), and test Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.594 (0.616).
Inferring Implicit Causal Relationships in Biomedical Literature

Biomedical relations are often expressed between entities occurring within the same sentence through syntactic means. However, a signiﬁcant portion of such relations (in particular, causal relations) are expressed implicitly across sentence boundaries. Inferring these discourse-level relations can be challenging in the absence of syntactic clues. In this paper, we present a study of textual characteristics that contribute to expression of implicit causal relations across sentence boundaries. Focusing on a chemical-disease relationship corpus, we identify and investigate the contribution of various features that can assist in identifying such inter-sentential relations. Using these features for supervised learning, we were able to improve previously reported best results by more than 13%. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed features and the importance of using a balanced dataset for this task.
A Survey of Randomized Algorithms in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Over the Internet today, computing and communications environments are significantly more complex and chaotic than classical distributed systems, lacking an y centralized organization or hierarchical control. There has been much interest in emerging Peer-to-Peer Networks, because they provide a good substrate for creating largescale data sharing, content distribution, and applicationlevel multicast applications. However, a lot of new problems arise from the blooming research of peer-to-peer networks. By seeking solutions to those problems, network researchers have been able to achieve great breakthroughs for many important issues in peer-to-peer systems. Among different adopted techniques, randomized algorithms are particular attractive to peer-to-peer network researchers, because they do not require the tight coordinates of different nodes in a distributed system or the information of the whole system. In this paper, we study the general principles of randomized algorithms and survey their existing applications in peer-to-peer networks.
Monitoring of Systems Behaviour

Usage of monitoring for the purpose of verification has grown in importance in recent years. In this thesis, we survey monitoring of a system for the purpose of a formal verification of its behaviour. To this aim, we use temporal logics and observation sequences as formalisms for describing system specification and its actual behaviour. In particular, we present an unifying view on monitoring of Linear Temporal Logic and Metric Interval Temporal Logic specifications. Furthermore, we present an extension of this view to handle monitoring of systems with unobservable parts and inaccurate measurement of time.
Increased Neuronal α-Synuclein Pathology Associates with Its Accumulation in Oligodendrocytes in Mice Modeling α-Synucleinopathies

Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by striatonigral degeneration and olivo-pontocerebellar atrophy. The histopathological hallmark of MSA is glial cytoplasmic inclusions (GCI) within oligodendrocytes, accompanied by neuronal degeneration. MSA is a synucleinopathy, and α-Synuclein (α-Syn) is the major protein constituent of the GCI. It is unclear how the neuronal α-Syn protein accumulates in oligodendrocytes. We tested the hypothesis that oligodendrocytes can take up neuronal-secreted α-Syn as part of the pathogenic mechanisms leading to MSA. We report that increases in the degree of α-Syn soluble oligomers or intracellular α-Syn levels, enhance its secretion from cultured MN9D dopaminergic cells, stably expressing the protein. In accord, we show that primary oligodendrocytes from rat brain and oligodendroglial cell lines take-up neuronal-secreted or exogenously added α-Syn from their conditioning medium. This uptake is concentration-, time-, and clathrin-dependent. Utilizing the demonstrated effect of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) to enhance α-Syn neuropathology, we show an in vivo effect for brain docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) levels on α-Syn localization to oligodendrocytes in brains of a mouse model for synucleinopathies, expressing human A53T α-Syn cDNA under the PrP promoter. Hence, pathogenic mechanisms leading to elevated levels of α-Syn in neurons underlie neuronal secretion and subsequent uptake of α-Syn by oligodendrocytes in MSA.
Eliminating SQL Injection Attacks - A Transparent Defense Mechanism

The widespread adoption of Web services as an instant means of information dissemination and various other transactions, has essentially made them a key component of today's Internet infrastructure. Web-based systems comprise both of infrastructure components and of application-specific code. Various organizations have started extensively deploying intrusion detection/prevention systems and Firewalls as a means of securing their vital installations. However, very little emphasis is laid on securing the applications that run on these systems, apart from frequent updates and patching. SQL-injection attacks are a class of attacks that many of these systems are highly vulnerable to, and there is no known fool-proof defense against such attacks. In this paper, we propose a technique, which combines static application code analysis with runtime validation to detect the occurrence of such attacks. The deployment of this technique eliminates the need to modify source code of application scripts, additionally allowing seamless integration with currently-deployed systems. We provide various optimizations improving overall efficiency, and also preliminary evaluation of prototype developed
Ontogeny, phylogeny, and morphology in anuran larvae: Morphometric analysis of cranial development and evolution in Rana tadpoles (Anura: Ranidae)

Comparative studies of chondrocranial morphology in larval anurans are typically qualitative in nature, focusing primarily on discrete variation or gross differences in the size or shape of individual structures. Detailed data on chondrocranial allometry are currently limited to only two species, Rana sylvatica and Bufo americanus. This study uses geometric morphometric and multivariate statistical analyses to examine interspecific variation in both larval chondrocranial shape and patterns of ontogenetic allometry among six species of Rana. Variation is interpreted within the context of hypothesized phylogenetic relationships among these species. Canonical variates analyses of geometric morphometric datasets indicate that species can be clearly discriminated based on chondrocranial shape, even when whole ontogenies are included in the analysis. Ordinations and cluster analyses based on chondrocranial shape data indicate the presence of three primary groupings (R. sylvatica; R. catesbeiana + R. clamitans; and R. palustris + R. pipiens + R. sphenocephala), and patterns of similarity closely reflect phylogenetic relationships. Analysis of chondrocranial allometry reveals that some patterns are conserved across all species (e.g., most measurements scale with negative allometry, those associated with the posterior palatoquadrate tend to scale with isometry or positive allometry). Ontogenetic scaling along similar allometric trajectories, lateral transpositions of individual trajectories, and variable allometric relationships all contribute to shape differences among species. Overall patterns of similarity among ontogenetic trajectories also strongly reflect phylogenetic relationships. Thus, this study demonstrates a tight link between ontogeny, phylogeny, and morphology, and highlights the importance of including both ontogenetic and phylogenetic data in studies of chondrocranial evolution in larval anurans. J. Morphol. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.