Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimistic Simulations of Physical Systems Using Reverse Computation

Efficient computer simulation of complex physical phenomena has long been challenging due to their multiphysics and multiscale nature. In contrast to traditional time-stepped execution methods, the authors describe an approach using optimistic parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) and reverse computation techniques to execute plasma physics codes. They show that reverse computation-based optimistic parallel execution can significantly reduce the execution time of an example plasma simulation without requiring a significant amount of additional memory compared to conservative execution techniques. The authors describe an application-level reverse computation technique that is efficient and suitable for complex scientific simulations.
Changing narratives? : shifting discursive conceptualisations of post-conflict peace-building

This thesis assesses the rationale behind the shifts, ruptures and paradigm changes within the scholarship on peace-building. In particular, the thesis is concerned with examining if, and how, these shifts have significantly altered the manner in which the foundational elements of thinking about peace-building have changed beyond the ‘liberal peace-building’ paradigm. To do so, the thesis engages with the logic of critique that has led to the emergence of different theoretical approaches to peace-building that culminate with the ‘local turn’. The thesis begins by tracing an initial shift towards more invasive forms of peace-building in the late 1990s-early 2000s, before engaging with the emergence of the local turn. The research focuses on the case of Kosovo in order to understand how a lessons-learnt approach facilitated the shift towards more invasive and intrusive forms of peace-building, which can be understood less as a deep reconceptualisation of the manner of conducting peace-building operations and more as a refinement of methods of socio-political engineering from the outside. Furthermore, the case of Kosovo is also central to the local turn, as the rise of local ownership discourses is fundamentally tied to the critiques of the extensive international mission in the territory, and of its by-products, particularly resistance and marginalisation of local agency. Along with an assessment of the theoretical underpinnings of the shift towards post-liberal, relational and non-linear approaches to bottom-up peace-building, the thesis examines the implications of the framing of the ‘everyday’ in order to assess the extent to which these bottom-up approaches have been able to by-pass the problems attributed to the liberal peace approach. By looking at its normative project of change, the thesis argues that despite its critical and radical intentions the local turn retains certain foundational epistemological and ontological elements of modernist and positivist approaches that have so far characterised the very mainstream approaches these critiques claim to transcend.
Behavioral Presence Test in Threatening Virtual Environments

Presence, the impression of being existent in artificially created places, is an important factor for achieving maximum experience in virtual environments (VEs) and hence in their use for experiments or therapy. To date, most clinical studies have used self-report questionnaires or physiological measures to appraise the degree of presence. Some studies that have tested behavioral scales have used a single VE, required additional equipment, or did not test psychometric properties during immersion in the VR. The current study described and tested an operationalized, easy-to-use scale of presence, the Behavior Presence Test in Threatening VEs (BPTT), through the observation of overt behavior exhibited by a sample of 40 participants during immersion in five different threatening virtual situations. The BPTT was compared with standard subjective and physiological measures of presence and anxiety. The VEs resulted in clear increases in anxiety and arousal. Most importantly, findings demonstrated the consistency, reliability and validity of the BPTT. Video game experience did not seem to have any impact on presence or on participants' behavior. The test is a step forward in creating an objective assessment of presence during the virtual reality experience and without the need for additional equipment. Future work should focus on developing broader tests suitable for use in any threatening or nonthreatening VEs.
Securing the Nimrod routing architecture

This paper describes the work undertaken to secure Nimrod, a complex and sophisticated routing system that unifies interior and exterior routing functions. The focus of this work is countering attacks that would degrade or deny service to network subscribers. The work began with an analysis of security requirements for Nimrod, based on a hybrid approach that refines top-down requirements generation with an understanding of attack scenarios and the capabilities and limitations of countermeasures. The countermeasures selected for use here include several newly developed sequence integrity mechanisms, plus a protocol for shared secret establishment. A novel aspect of this work is the protection of subscriber traffic in support of the overall communication availability security goal.
A lower bound of the necessary bit length of memory for approximation of discrete time systems

In this paper, we deal with approximation problem of discrete time linear systems by bit memory systems. The bit memory systems are operators from analog inputs to discretized outputs and their memories are elements of discrete numbers. Their dynamics is represented by the time evolution of the bit memories and output equations. In this paper, we consider the minimization problem of bit length of the memories with which the bit memory systems attain a given output error bound for the original systems. We at first show that this problem can be followed by an optimal quantization problem of the state space of the original systems and give a lower bound of the minimal bit length of memory by the properties of the original systems in the case of nth order systems. Moreover, we also give the exact value of the minimal bit length of memory in the case 1st order systems. This is the first result on the minimal bit length of memory in the approximation problem.
Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis for the Federal Statistical Agencies

Government statistical agencies collect enormously valuable data on the nation's population and business activities. Wide access to these data enables evidence-based policy making, supports new research that improves society, facilitates training for students in data science, and provides resources for the public to better understand and participate in their society. These data also affect the private sector. For example, the Employment Situation in the United States, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, moves markets. Nonetheless, government agencies are under increasing pressure to limit access to data because of a growing understanding of the threats to data privacy and confidentiality. "De-identification" - stripping obvious identifiers like names, addresses, and identification numbers - has been found inadequate in the face of modern computational and informational resources. Unfortunately, the problem extends even to the release of aggregate data statistics. This counter-intuitive phenomenon has come to be known as the Fundamental Law of Information Recovery. It says that overly accurate estimates of too many statistics can completely destroy privacy. One may think of this as death by a thousand cuts. Every statistic computed from a data set leaks a small amount of information about each member of the data set - a tiny cut. This is true even if the exact value of the statistic is distorted a bit in order to preserve privacy. But while each statistical release is an almost harmless little cut in terms of privacy risk for any individual, the cumulative effect can be to completely compromise the privacy of some individuals.
Web Server To Identify Similarity of Amino Acid Motifs to Compounds (SAAMCO)

Protein-protein interactions are fundamental in mediating biological processes including metabolism, cell growth, and signaling. To be able to selectively inhibit or induce protein activity or complex formation is a key feature in controlling disease. For those situations in which protein-protein interactions derive substantial affinity from short linear peptide sequences, or motifs, we can develop search algorithms for peptidomimetic compounds that resemble the short peptide's structure but are not compromised by poor pharmacological properties. SAAMCO is a Web service ( http://bioware.ucd.ie/ approximately saamco) that facilitates the screening of motifs with known structures against bioactive compound databases. It is built on an algorithm that defines compound similarity based on the presence of appropriate amino acid side chain fragments and a favorable Root Mean Squared Deviation (RMSD) between compound and motif structure. The methodology is efficient as the available compound databases are preprocessed and fast regular expression searches filter potential matches before time-intensive 3D superposition is performed. The required input information is minimal, and the compound databases have been selected to maximize the availability of information on biological activity. "Hits" are accompanied with a visualization window and links to source database entries. Motif matching can be defined on partial or full similarity which will increase or reduce respectively the number of potential mimetic compounds. The Web server provides the functionality for rapid screening of known or putative interaction motifs against prepared compound libraries using a novel search algorithm. The tabulated results can be analyzed by linking to appropriate databases and by visualization.
The Potorous CPD Photolyase Rescues a Cryptochrome-Deficient Mammalian Circadian Clock

Despite the sequence and structural conservation between cryptochromes and photolyases, members of the cryptochrome/photolyase (flavo)protein family, their functions are divergent. Whereas photolyases are DNA repair enzymes that use visible light to lesion-specifically remove UV-induced DNA damage, cryptochromes act as photoreceptors and circadian clock proteins. To address the functional diversity of cryptochromes and photolyases, we investigated the effect of ectopically expressed Arabidopsis thaliana (6-4)PP photolyase and Potorous tridactylus CPD-photolyase (close and distant relatives of mammalian cryptochromes, respectively), on the performance of the mammalian cryptochromes in the mammalian circadian clock. Using photolyase transgenic mice, we show that Potorous CPD-photolyase affects the clock by shortening the period of behavioral rhythms. Furthermore, constitutively expressed CPD-photolyase is shown to reduce the amplitude of circadian oscillations in cultured cells and to inhibit CLOCK/BMAL1 driven transcription by interacting with CLOCK. Importantly, we show that Potorous CPD-photolyase can restore the molecular oscillator in the liver of (clock-deficient) Cry1/Cry2 double knockout mice. These data demonstrate that a photolyase can act as a true cryptochrome. These findings shed new light on the importance of the core structure of mammalian cryptochromes in relation to its function in the circadian clock and contribute to our further understanding of the evolution of the cryptochrome/photolyase protein family.
Der Open-access-publikationsserver Der Zbw – Leibniz-informationszentrum Wirtschaft the Open Access Publication Server of the Zbw – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Redistributive Preferences, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from a Panel of Oecd Countries Redistributive Preferences,

Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. * This paper describes individuals' inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences in a panel of OECD countries, primarily focusing on the association between these subjective measures and the effective level of inequality and redistribution. Not surprisingly, the effective level of redistribution (after tax-and-transfer inequality) is positively (negatively) correlated with redistributive preferences. There is also evidence showing that the subjective and objective dimension of inequality and redistribution are, at least partially, linked with individuals' political preferences and their voting behavior. The association between objective and subjective measures of inequality and redistribution vanishes, however, once more fundamental country characteristics are taken into account. This suggests that these characteristics explain both redistributive preferences as well as the effective level of redistribution and after tax-and-transfer inequality.
Spatial Augmented Reality on Mobile Robots

Novel approaches have taken Augmented Reality (AR) beyond traditional body-worn or hand-held displays, leading to the creation of a new branch of AR: Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) providing additional application areas. SAR is a rapidly emerging field that uses digital projectors to render virtual objects onto 3D objects in the real space. When mounting digital projectors on robots, this collaboration paves the way for unique Human-Robot Interactions (HRI) that otherwise would not be possible. Adding to robots the capability of projecting interactive Augmented Reality content, enables new forms of interactions between humans, robots, and virtual objects, enabling new applications. In this work it is investigated the use of SAR techniques on mobile robots for better enabling this to interact with elderly or injured people during rehabilitation, or with children in the pediatric ward of a hospital.
Numerical Investigation of the Plasma Formation in Distilled Water by Nd-YAG Laser Pulses of Different Duration

Water breakdown studies by Nd-YAG laser pulses of duration 100 fs, 30 ps and 6 ns at wavelength 1064 nm are pre- formed to investigate the physical mechanisms which couple the laser energy into the medium. Calculations are carried out applying a modified kinetic model of water breakdown previously developed by Kennedy (1995) to investigate the correlation between threshold intensity of breakdown and laser pulse length. The modifications considered the introduction of diffusion and recombination loss processes which might take place under the experimental conditions applied in these calculations. The validity of the model is tested by comparing the calculated threshold intensities and the experimentally measured ones where good agreement is shown. The study of the time evolution of the electron density clarifies the correlation between the pulse length and dominant ionization mechanism. The analysis of the spatial distribution of the electron density along the radial and axial distances of the focal spot showed that the size of the formed plasma increases with the increase of the pulse length. On the other hand, studies of self-focusing effect illustrated that under the investigated experimental conditions the effect of this process has an effective contribution only at laser pulses of the order of femtosecond scale when the laser beam is focused by a lens of a focal length ≥8.0 cm. This result in turns assures that using femtosecond pulses in ophthalmic microsurgery could be a safe tool from the retinal damage.
Voltage‐dependent Kinetics of N‐Methyl‐d‐aspartate Synaptic Currents in Rat Cerebellar Granule Cells

Decay kinetics of N‐methyl‐d‐aspartate excitatory postsynaptic currents (NMDA‐EPSCs) have been voltage‐dependent in some, but not all neurons studied so far, and almost no information has been available on the voltage‐dependence of the rising phase. In this work we investigated the effect of membrane potential on rising and decay kinetics of the NMDA‐EPSC in cerebellar granule cells using the tight‐seal whole‐cell recording technique. NMDA‐EPSCs were evoked by electrical mossy fibre stimulation in the presence of 10 μM 6‐cyano‐7‐nitroquinoxaline‐2,3‐dione, 1.2 mM Mg2+ and 5 μM glycine. The rate of rise of NMDA‐EPSCs remained substantially unchanged when the cell was depolarized, indicating that the limiting step of channel opening was voltage‐insensitive. The NMDA‐EPSC, however, flattened around the peak and the time‐to‐peak increased. This observation was explained by the influence of decay. Decay was biphasic and slowed down with membrane depolarization. Moreover, the fast component of decay increased less than the slow component. This complex voltage‐dependence may extend the integrative role of the NMDA current during synaptic transmission.
Assessing the Impact of Study Abroad on Student Learning at Michigan State University

I n t r o d u c t i o n Michigan State University (MSU) is strongly committed to the idea that study abroad is deeply beneficial and important for undergraduate students. However there is a relative scarcity of systematically gathered qualitative and quantitative information that assesses the impact of study abroad. In the summer of 2000, MSU implemented a broad plan to design and put in place mechanisms for continuously assessing the impact of study abroad on students, on faculty, and on MSU as a whole. From the beginning, " assessment of the impact of study abroad " was broadly construed to focus on measuring the acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes that students need to live and work in the 21 st century. Specifically, this would include intellectual growth, personal growth, intercultural awareness, and professional development, but not the evaluation of specific study abroad programs. An institutional assessment committee was established to oversee the project, setting the general direction and goals of the project, with the day-today responsibility for the activities of the project delegated to staff members. The assessment project is expected to continue indefinitely and so far two phases have been completed. Phase I (summer of 2000–May 2001) focused almost solely on certain aspects of the impact of study abroad on students. Phase II (May 2001–December 2002) continued the student-focused assessment, and included first steps of assessing the impact of study abroad on faculty and on college budgets. Phase III (started in January 2003) will continue components of assessment of student learning while also looking into other aspects of the effects of study abroad on the University. The project has been sensitive to the potential for taking on more than it can accomplish. In particular, care has been taken not to attempt to undertake studies that involve a level of complexity of experimental design that is beyond the project's
BegBunch: benchmarking for C bug detection tools

Benchmarks for bug detection tools are still in their infancy. Though in recent years various tools and techniques were introduced, little effort has been spent on creating a benchmark suite and a harness for a consistent quantitative and qualitative performance measurement. For assessing the performance of a bug detection tool and determining which tool is better than another for the type of code to be looked at, the following questions arise: 1) how many bugs are correctly found, 2) what is the tool's average false positive rate, 3) how many bugs are missed by the tool altogether, and 4) does the tool scale. In this paper we present our contribution to the C bug detection community: two benchmark suites that allow developers and users to evaluate accuracy and scalability of a given tool. The two suites contain buggy, mature open source code; bugs are representative of "real world" bugs. A harness accompanies each benchmark suite to compute automatically qualitative and quantitative performance of a bug detection tool. BegBunch has been tested to run on the Solaris#8482;, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. We show the generality of the harness by evaluating it with our own Parfait and three publicly available bug detection tools developed by others.
Copyright Protection for Digital Images on Portable Devices

The astonishing rapid diffusion of portable devices (i.e. smartphones, tablets, etc.) has had a big, and often positive, impact on our every-day life. These devices have new advanced features developed specifically because of user demand. For example, it is now possible to publish directly the pictures obtained by means of the internal camera of a smartphone on our social network accounts, or on an image hosting service. It is therefore important to have tools, on the portable devices, that can prove the ownership of the pictures and to use them before publishing images. Digital watermarking techniques are commonly used for the copyright protection of images and videos. We have developed a tool for portable devices based on the Android OS that allows the embedding of a digital visible or invisible watermark into a digital image.
Promotion of creative activity in children with severe autism through visuals in an interactive multisensory environment

Autism is a developmental disorder which presents disability in communication and socialisation and a lack of imagination. To promote creativity, exploration and enjoyment in low functioning autistic children that have no verbal communication, we propose MEDIATE, an interactive environment that generates real time visual, aural and vibrotactile stimuli. This paper focuses on the design of interaction with visuals within MEDIATE. The design is guided by the objectives of giving children a sense of agency and enhance non repetitive actions. Other guidelines of this design include natural interaction, use of non invasive technology and non representational visuals. This visual interaction (together with sound and vibrotacile) allows the children to enjoy MEDIATE and be creative within this environment.