Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A non-interactive deniable authentication scheme in the standard model

Deniable authentication protocols enable a sender to authenticate a message to a receiver such that the receiver is unable to prove the identity of the sender to a third party. In contrast to interactive schemes, non-interactive deniable authentication schemes improve communication efficiency. Currently, several non-interactive deniable authentication schemes have been proposed with provable security in the random oracle model. In this paper, we study the problem of constructing non-interactive deniable authentication scheme secure in the standard model without bilinear groups. An efficient non-interactive deniable authentication scheme is presented by combining the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol with authenticated encryption schemes. We prove the security of our scheme by sequences of games and show that the computational cost of our construction can be dramatically reduced by applying pre-computation technique.
THE SARG PLANET SEARCH

The search for planets in multiple systems allows to improve our knowledge of planet formation and evolution. On one hand, the frequency of planets in binary systems has a strong effect on the global frequency of planets, as more than half of solar-type stars are in binary or multiple systems (Duquennoy and Mayor 1991). On the other hand, the properties of planets in binaries, and their differences with the properties of the planets orbiting single stars, would shed light on the effects caused by the presence of the companion stars. Indeed, the first analysis of the properties of planets in binaries showed the occurrence of some differences with respect to those orbiting single stars (Zucker and Mazeh 2002; Eggenberger et al. 2004).
What are the determinants of subjective well-being of healthy adults in rural communities in and around forests?

Sustainability goals are seeking to jointly improve environmental conditions and the well-being of society. Yet achieving both environmental and human well-being goals remains challenging because improving the material well-being of people can often mean increasing the risk of environmental and ecosystem degradation. An alternative method that may help meet both goals is to target non-monetary determinants of subjective well-being. However. few studies have examined the determinants of subjective well-being in industrializing countries. Here, we report on an analysis examining the determinants of subjective well-being among health, working adults in rural villages in and around forests in the Berau Regency, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. We find there is no significant relationship between subjective well-being and measures of monetary well-being, such as income and assets. Instead, we find age, sex, self-assessed health status, and occupation are significantly associated with subjective well-being. Our results have implications for policies seeking to improve subjective well-being among these populations.
A Glaucoma-Specific Brief Motivational Interviewing Training Program for Ophthalmology Para-professionals: Assessment of Feasibility and Initial Patient Impact

ABSTRACT Our objective was to test the feasibility of, fidelity to, and initial impact of a brief, glaucoma-specific motivational interviewing (MI) training program for ophthalmic para-professionals. This prospective, mixed-methods study had two components, one for staff and one for patients. Staff fidelity to MI principles was graded through audio-recorded encounters after initial and final training sessions. After training, patients graded staff for adherence to autonomy supportive care. Semi-structured interviews with para-professionals elicited feedback about the training and about their ability to implement MI in the clinic. The impact on patient satisfaction with staff communication, eye drop instillation self-efficacy, and overall health activation was assessed using a survey pre- and post-training. Para-professionals met two of three program goals for MI skills and improved in their overall scores for MI fidelity. Para-professionals noted lack of time in the clinic as a significant barrier to implementing counseling. Patient satisfaction with staff communication increased after the training (p = 0.04) among patients who rated their staff above the mean for providing autonomy supportive care. The intervention did not improve patients’ eye drop instillation self-efficacy or overall health activation. Training para-professional staff in brief, glaucoma-specific MI techniques is feasible and may improve patient satisfaction, though dedicated time in clinic is needed to implement MI counseling into glaucoma practice.
El VIH y la proximidad corporal. Sexo, amor y silencio entre varones gay

We present the results of an ethnographic study, which the main objective was to analyze the ways in which living with HIV is intertwined with norms of social valuation that delineate possibilities of corporal proximity. From a series of visits made to a place of sexual encounters for gay men called “las cabinas”, and resorting to other narratives about what it means to be gay and live with the virus, it is analyzed how the identity is positioned according to knowledge related to love and sex. In conclusion, some of the ways in which affective approaches and distances, as well as other elements that regulate sexual interaction - such as silence - help to shape the experience of living with HIV.
Implementation of e-Learning in Ghanaian Tertiary Institutions (A Case Study of KNUST)

This study explores the implementation of e-learning in Ghanaian tertiary institutions with KNUST as a case study. The objectives of the study examined the advantages and disadvantages of e-learning to KNUST, the various types of e-learning systems considered by KNUST, the ‘Moodle’ E-learning system adopted by KNUST, the strategies involved in the e-learning system, the challenges faced by KNUST in the implementation of its elearning system along with possible solutions and finally a recommendation on critical issues to be considered for the effective implementation of the e-learning system. A descriptive study with a cross-sectional design was done. For tertiary institutions in Ghana, recommendations were made for them to adopt e-learning to augment and highly impact teaching and learning given the ever-increasing enrolment figures. It was also recommended that they chose an e-learning system which blends open source system and course management system such as Moodle due to cost, features, specifications, support and mode of course management
A topic based indexing approach for searching in documents

Nowadays, users of computers store a lot of text documents. This requires fast and precise searches over documents. The goal of Information Retrieval (IR) models is to provide users with those documents that will satisfy their information needs. The core of such models is the document representation used in the indexing of documents. Traditional IR models handle the frequency of query terms. The disadvantage of these models is that they exclusively consider terms in the query and ignore similar terms. This paper proposes a topic based indexing approach to represent topics associated to documents. Documents are modeled by using clustering algorithms based on natural language processing. As result of this proposal is a document-topic matrix representation denoting the importance of topics inside documents. In a similar way, each query over documents is converted into a vector of topics. Thus, a similarity measure can be applied over this vector and the matrix of documents to retrieve the most relevant documents.
Novel Hybrid Adaptive Controller for Manipulation in Complex Perturbation Environments

In this paper we present a hybrid control scheme, combining the advantages of task-space and joint-space control. The controller is based on a human-like adaptive design, which minimises both control effort and tracking error. Our novel hybrid adaptive controller has been tested in extensive simulations, in a scenario where a Baxter robot manipulator is affected by external disturbances in the form of interaction with the environment and tool-like end-effector perturbations. The results demonstrated improved performance in the hybrid controller over both of its component parts. In addition, we introduce a novel method for online adaptation of learning parameters, using the fuzzy control formalism to utilise expert knowledge from the experimenter. This mechanism of meta-learning induces further improvement in performance and avoids the need for tuning through trial testing.
Appearance-based Data Association for 3D and Multisensory SLAM in Structured Environment

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been studied a lot since 20 years in the robotics community: a SLAM method copes with the incremental construction of a geometrical model from the successive fusion of observations acquired from moving sensors. When sensors are embedded on a mobile robot, robot localization and environment mapping must be performed in the same function. Many methods aim to build sparse representations, made of 2D segments (from 2D laser data for indoor applications) or 3D points (from a single camera or stereovision): this paper discusses some issues related to 3D and dense SLAM, i.e. the incremental construction of a textured surfacic model from the fusion of sensory data acquired from a 3D laser range finder coupled with a camera: the fusion of multisensory data in a unified 3D representation makes more robust the data association between features perceived from different viewpoints. First an heterogeneous model, made of a stochastic map and of appearance-based information, is described, before focusing on the data association function; our approach is validated by experimental results obtained from data acquired on our Jido robot.
Owning an Overweight or Underweight Body: Distinguishing the Physical, Experienced and Virtual Body

Our bodies are the most intimately familiar objects we encounter in our perceptual environment. Virtual reality provides a unique method to allow us to experience having a very different body from our own, thereby providing a valuable method to explore the plasticity of body representation. In this paper, we show that women can experience ownership over a whole virtual body that is considerably smaller or larger than their physical body. In order to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying body ownership, we use an embodiment questionnaire, and introduce two new behavioral response measures: an affordance estimation task (indirect measure of body size) and a body size estimation task (direct measure of body size). Interestingly, after viewing the virtual body from first person perspective, both the affordance and the body size estimation tasks indicate a change in the perception of the size of the participant's experienced body. The change is biased by the size of the virtual body (overweight or underweight). Another novel aspect of our study is that we distinguish between the physical, experienced and virtual bodies, by asking participants to provide affordance and body size estimations for each of the three bodies separately. This methodological point is important for virtual reality experiments investigating body ownership of a virtual body, because it offers a better understanding of which cues (e.g. visual, proprioceptive, memory, or a combination thereof) influence body perception, and whether the impact of these cues can vary between different setups.
Assessment of malondialdehyde levels, superoxide dismutase, and catalase activity in children with autism spectrum disorders

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE: Blood biomarkers for diseases have recently become a topic of great interest. Many studies of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been made to date looking for biomarkers in peripheral tissues, but no specific biomarker has yet been found. The aim of this study was to examine oxidative stress parameters including malondialdehyde (MDA) levels, superoxide dismutase (SOD), and catalase (CAT) activity and to determine both their sensitivity and specificity as biomarkers associated with oxidative stress in ASD. METHODS: This study measured the plasma MDA levels, SOD, and CAT activities in erythrocyte in 52 patients with ASD (aged 3–6 years) and in 48 age- and gender-matched healthy controls. ASD severity was rated using the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS). RESULTS: MDA levels, SOD, and CAT activity were significantly higher in patients with ASD in comparison to the controls (p < .001). The receiver operator characteristic curve analysis showed a high diagnostic value for MDA, SOD, and CAT. Their areas under curve (AUC) were 0.937, 1.0, and 1.0, respectively (p < .001). A positive statistically significant correlation was determined between the total CARS score and MDA levels in ASD patients (r = 0.368, p = 0.007). CONCLUSION: This study shows that oxidative stress is higher in children with ASD. Increased vulnerability to oxidative stress may contribute to the development of ASD. Given the high sensitivity and specificity results, it is thought that these selected oxidative stress parameters could be important as biomarkers for ASD. Future studies should focus on the sensitivity and specificity of oxidative stress biomarkers in larger ASD populations.
Time Variation in Asset Return Dependence: Strength or Structure?

The dependence between asset returns varies. Its strength can become stronger or weaker. Also, its structure can change, for example, when asymmetries related to bull and bear markets become more or less pronounced. To analyze these different types of variations, we develop a model that separately accommodates these changes. It combines a mixture of structurally different copulas with time variation. Our model shows both types of changes in the dependence between several equity market returns. Ignoring them leads to biases in risk measures. An underestimation of Value-at-Risk by maximum 15% occurs exactly when most harmful, during crisis periods.
Children, Time Allocation, and Consumption Insurance

We study choices of households deciding on consumption and allocation of spouses’ time to work, leisure, and child care. With uncertainty, the allocation of goods and time over the life cycle also serves the purpose of smoothing marginal utility in response to shocks. Combining data on consumption, wages, hours of work, and time spent with children, we compute the sensitivity of consumption and time allocation to transitory and permanent wage shocks. We find that family labor supply responses depend on three counteracting forces: complementarity of leisure time, substitutability of time in the production of child services, and added worker effects.
Analysis and Synthesis of Textures With Pairwise Signal Interactions

The methods for the extraction of the main texture properties and for the subsequent texture synthesis are proposed based on the formal definitions of the essential statistical properties and the notion of texture in terms of pairwise and singleton signal interactions. The iterative synthesis procedure is a successive approximation in the space of the selected statistical properties towards the point corresponding to the reference texture properties. As a tool for the image sequence generation the stochastic relaxation mechanism is used. The image is assumed to be a state from the family of random fields. The proof of the convergence of the controlled stochastic generating procedure is included. Index Terms -texture, successive approximation, stochastic relaxation, random field
Verifying Isolation Properties in the Presence of Middleboxes

Great progress has been made recently in verifying the correctness of router forwarding tables [17, 19, 20, 26]. However, these approaches do not work for networks containing middleboxes such as caches and firewalls whose forwarding behavior depends on previously observed traffic. We explore how to verify isolation properties in networks that include such “dynamic datapath” elements using model checking. Our work leverages recent advances in SMT solvers, and the main challenge lies in scaling the approach to handle large and complicated networks. While the straightforward application of model checking to this problem can only handle very small networks (if at all), our approach can verify simple realistic invariants on networks containing 30,000 middleboxes in a few minutes.
A Pure Geometric Model for a Main Sequence Star

A pure geometric field theory is used to construct a model for a spherically symmetric configuration. The model obtained can be considered as a pure geometric one in the sense that the tensor describing the material distributions is not a phenomenological object, but a part of the geometric structure used. A general equation of state is obtained from, and not imposed on, the model. The solution obtained shows that there are different zones characterizing the configuration: a central radiation dominant zone, a convection zone and a corona. The model can represent a main sequence star. The present work shows that Einstein’s geometrization scheme can be extended to gain more physical information within material distribution.
Inkantatory paper: dynamically color-changing prints with multiple functional inks

We propose an effective combination of multiple functional inks, including conductive silver ink, thermo-chromic ink, and regular inkjet ink, for a novel paper-based interface called Inkantatory Paper that can dynamically change the color of its printed pattern. Constructed with off-the-shelf inkjet printing using silver conductive ink, our system enables users to fabricate thin, flat, flexible, and low-cost interactive paper. We evaluated the characteristics of the conductive silver ink as a heating system for the thermo-chromic ink and created applications demonstrating the usability of the system.
Controlled equalization of multi-carrier CDMA in an indoor Rician fading channel

In this paper, a novel digital modulation technique called Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is analyzed. With MC-CDMA, each data symbol is transmitted at multiple subcarriers with each subcarrier modulated by "1" or "-1" based on a spreading code. Analytical results are presented on the performance of this modulation/multiple access scheme in the downlink of an indoor wireless Rician fading channel. The performance of a controlled equalization technique that attempts to restore the orthogonality between users is evaluated. <<ETX>>
Evaluation of the effect of Vaccinium arctostaphylos L. fruit extract on serum inflammatory biomarkers in adult hyperlipidemic patients: a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial

Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory condition. Many pro-inflammatory factors including interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), C-reactive protein (CRP), and adhesion molecules including intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM-1) and vascular cell adhesion molecule (VCAM-1) are expressed in atherosclerotic lesions. The plants of genus Vaccinium are rich in anthocyanins with anti-inflammatory effects. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of Vaccinium arctostaphylos fruit extract on the serum level of TNF-α, IL-6, ICAM-1, and VCAM-1 in adult patients with mild hyperlipidemia to detect its possible inhibitory effects on progression of atherosclerosis. In a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial, eligible hyperlipidemic patients were randomly and equally divided in to two groups of study drug or placebo control to receive either the Vaccinium extract or placebo capsules, respectively, twice daily for four consecutive weeks. Each drug capsule contained 0.8 mg of anthocyanins. Serum levels of TNF-α, IL-6, ICAM-1, and VCAM-1 were measured before and after the interventions and finally were compared.A total of 8 men and 12 women in drug group as well as 11 men and 9 women in placebo group completed the study (P = 0.527). The use of Vaccinium extract significantly reduced only the IL-6 level (P = 0.037); however, this reduction was not significant compared to placebo (P = 0.062). Consumption of Vaccinium arctostaphylos fruit extract with the dose of 500 mg twice daily did not show any significant effect on serum levels of TNF-α, IL-6, ICAM-1, and VCAM-1 in adult hyperlipidemic patients. However, considering slight decrease in the level of IL-6, ICAM-1, and VCAM-1, the use of higher doses with longer duration might have significant effects on these factors.
The efficiency and effectiveness of engineers as full-time and part-time teachers in selected colleges of engineering of higher learning: an assessment

The study assessed the efficiency and effectiveness of engineers as full-time and part-time college of engineering teachers in selected institutions of higher learning in the National Capital Region of the Philippines. Specifically, answers were sought in terms of how efficient/effective are professional engineers as full-time and part-time engineering teachers as perceived by the engineer-teachers themselves and the students; if there is any significant difference in the perception of the engineer-teacher themselves and the students on the efficiency/effectiveness of full-time and part-time engineering teachers; how the efficiency/effectiveness as full-time and part-time engineering teachers relate to the demographic variables; what factors are perceived as constraints to efficient/effective teaching according to the engineer-teachers; how may the efficiency/effectiveness of engineers as full-time and part-time engineering teachers be improved to upgrade the quality of the instructional delivery services at the colleges of engineering.
EFFECT OF EMPLOYEE MORALE ON PRODUCTIVITY IN THE GHANAIAN PUBLIC SECTOR. THE MEDIATING ROLE OF DELEGATION

Delegation of authority is one of modern trends practiced by managers, and a key management skill in the business world. It enhances human relations amongst organizational members, increases self-confidence among employees and raise the level of tasks accomplishment in tasks. The study sought to assess the effect of delegation on employee morale and productivity in public sector organisations in Ghana. The target population included all the workers in the public sector of Ghana from which the simple random sampling technique was employed to select 128 workers from 20 public sector organisations across the country. The findings from the study show that delegation of authority has a positive and significant relation with employee morale and productivity. Subsequently, the study also revealed that delegation fully mediates the relationship between employee morale and productivity. Based on the findings, it is recommended that organisations should utilise or adopt the concept of delegation in performing organisational duties. Again, organisations should implement measures or strategies that can help build the morale of employees.
Boosting for Vote Learning in High-Dimensional kNN Classification

Intrinsically high-dimensional data has recently been shown to exhibit substantial hubness in terms of skewne ss of the k-nearest neighbor occurrence frequency distribution. While some points arise as centers of influence and dominate most k-nearest neighbor sets, other points occur very rarely and barely affect the inferred models. Hubness has been shown to be highly detrimental to many learning tasks and several hubnessaware learning methods have recently been proposed. This paper extends the existing fuzzy neighbor occurrence model s in order to enable cost-sensitive learning. We evaluate the ex tended implementations within the context of multi-class boosting, which is used to learn the appropriate neighbor votes during the reweighting iterations. The proposed approach is evaluated o n a series of high-dimensional datasets from various domains. The results demonstrate promising improvements of the propose d approach over the baselines.