Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extreme precipitation in a future climate-assessing climate factors at sub-daily scales from regional climate model projections

The anticipated increase in extreme precipitation is expected to be one of the most important impacts of climate change in Danish cities. Hence, guidelines on how these changes can be incorporated in urban design practice are required. This paper compiles all the new information available on climate projections at sub-daily scales and re-evaluates the current guidelines. The information compiled includes three statistical downscaling methods, an ensemble of regional climate models (RCMs) and four different emission scenarios. This study highlights that a relatively large amount of the data available is not suited to the needs of urban drainage design. Therefore, statistical downscaling methods that can accommodate these needs are necessary. The three statistical downscaling methods used here agree on an expected increase of extreme precipitation at both sub-daily and daily scales. However, the changes estimated are subject to large uncertainties, mainly arising from the RCMs and emission scenarios. To account for the uncertainties, both mean and high climate factors are provided in the new guidelines. This study discusses the difficulty of an objective selection of recommended changes and emphasises the need of expert knowledge to combine all the information and account for uncertainties.
UntrustIDE: Exploiting Weaknesses in VS Code Extensions

—With the rise in threats against the software supply chain, developer integrated development environments (IDEs) present an attractive target for attackers. For example, researchers have found extensions for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) that start web servers and can be exploited via JavaScript executing in a web browser on the developer’s host. This paper seeks to systematically understand the landscape of vulnerabilities in VS Code’s extension marketplace. We identify a set of four sources of untrusted input and three code targets that can be used for code injection and file integrity attacks and use them to design taint analysis rules in CodeQL. We then perform an ecosystem-level analysis of the VS Code extension marketplace, studying 25,402 extensions that contain code. Our results show that while vulnerabilities are not pervasive, they exist and impact millions of users. Specifically, we find 21 extensions with verified proof of concept exploits of code injection attacks impacting a total of over 6 million installations. Through this study, we demonstrate the need for greater attention to the security of IDE extensions.
Factor VIII as a Novel Biomarker for Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Therapy Prediction in Human Cancer and Other Disorders

Coagulation factor VIII (FVIII) is an essential cofactor in the coagulation cascade, encoded by the F8 gene on the long arm of chromosome X (Xq28). FVIII is normally circulated in complex with Von Willebrand factor (VWF) and has relevant emerging extracoagulative functions. Dysregulation of FVIII is associated with tumor progression, and could be used as a novel biomarker for tumor screening and monitoring. In breast cancer, bladder cancer, colorectal carcinoma, esophageal carcinoma, hepatocellular carcinoma and lung cancer, F8 is regarded as an oncogene. In coronary heart disease, hemophilia A and liver disease, F8 dysregulation has been recognized as a potential biomarker for disease diagnosis and prognosis. However, the basis of these differential expression levels remains to be understood. In this review, which is a mixture of literature review and bioinformatics analysis we described the biological functions and characteristics of FVIII, and also its expression level in non-malignant disorders and various cancers.
Assessment on Interpretive Technique of Transmissivity and Storativity on Aquifers: Case of Legedadi Deep Wells

Urban part of our country has seen a very dramatic expansions and population growth in the past two decades. Addis Ababa is one of the major city that’s affected by this expansion and population growth. Due to this the water supply demand for the city has also increased dramatically. To meet this ever growing demand Addis Ababa Water Supply and Sewerage Authority has been developing groundwater around Addis Ababa area. One of these groundwater developments is in Legedadi well fields. The Legedadi well field’s yield capacity is estimated to be around 45,000m3/d. This potential will be harvested by development of 40 deep wells in the area of which 10 deep wells have been constructed and tested around Legedadi Legetafo Ayat areas. This ten wells have been drilled with average depth of 300m and are sparsely located over the Legedadi well filed. The currently drilled and developed ten well in the well fields do not have an observation well thus, they are considered as a single well tests. The drawdowns for each of the well is measured in the drilled well itself and the analysis is based on this drawdowns. The fact that effects of partial pentation and well head loss have not be counted in the analysis of the wells caused the transmissivity and storativity to vary greatly form the true aquifer nature in the Legedadi well fields.The two major emphasise that was given in this research when trying to determine the transmissivity and storativity using the Copper-Jacob method, Theis method and recovery method is the well efficiency and the effects of partial penetration of the wells. When the well efficiency was determined for the wells, for two wells there efficiency fail drastically below the accepted range of well efficiency and grater partial penetration effect was observed in two other wells. When this three methods are applied to this for the observed and drawdown data the result of the transmissivity and storativity greatly differ from the values that’s is determined when the head loss in the well is considered using the well efficiency or effect of partial penetration. Thus this indicates the well to be over pumped or underestimate in some case in this ten wells.
VETEOS: Statically Vetting EOSIO Contracts for the "Groundhog Day" Vulnerabilities

—In this paper, we propose V ET EOS, a static vetting tool for the “Groundhog Day” vulnerabilities in EOSIO contracts. In a “Groundhog Day” attack, culprits leverage the distinctive rollback issue in EOSIO contracts, which allows them to persistently execute identical contract code with varying inputs. By using the information exposed in prior executions, these attackers unlawfully amass insights about the target contract, thereby figuring out a reliable method to generate unauthorized profits. To tackle this problem, we formally define this unique vulnerability as a control and data dependency problem, and develop a custom static analysis tool, V ET EOS, that can precisely discover such bugs directly from EOSIO WebAssembly (WASM) bytecode. V ET EOS has detected 735 new vulnerabilities in the wild and outperforms the state-of-the-art EOSIO contract analyzer.
Evaluation of TOC concept in industrial wastewater at SART AS

Approximately 98 % of the industrial wastewater that SART receives comes from offshore activities. Unlike municipal waste water, this wastewater contains relatively high Total Organic Carbon (TOC), and very little Nitrogen (N) and Phosphorus (P). The objective is to reduce TOC, and therefore nutrients N and P are added to the biological reactor. For the chemical and the biological processes, Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) units are coupled with activated sludge. Combining chemical and biological processes is effective in reducing harmful components in the wastewater. In order to follow biodegradation on samples with different TOC concentrations, three laboratory bench tests were considered. Sludge washing of activated sludge and flocculation tests on selected water samples was done before start up of the bench tests. Samples before start up and at the end of each bench test were sending externally for Hydrocarbon (HC) analyses. During bench experiments more than 90 % of the initial DOC concentration was degraded within 3 days showing good effectiveness of activated sludge process. GC/MS results showed that most of the compounds identified before cycles belonging to glycol and glycol ethers that are known to be rapidly degraded. Overview of Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOP) for treating slowly biodegradable components is given.
Co-seisimic Surface Rupture and Dextral-slip Oblique Thrusting of the M_S 8.0 Wenchuan Earthquake

At 2:28 pm, 12 May 2008, the MS 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake struck the Longmenshan area, the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan, China. Besides the huge casualties and property losses, a most complicated yet longest thrust-type co-seismic surface rupture zone was developed in the quake-hit area. Field surveys indicate that the Wenchuan earthquake produced at least two NE-trending NW-dipping surface rupture faults on the Longmenshan fault: Yingxiu-Beichuan fault and Guanxian-Anxian faults. The former about 275 km of surface rupture is characterized by dextral-slip thrusting, with a maximum vertical displacement of 11 m and a dextral-slip displacement of 12 m. The latter about 80 km of surface rupture is characterized by pure thrusting, with a maximum vertical displacement of 4 m. Furthermore, the earthquake also produced a 6 km-long NW-trending Xiaoyudong rupture zone, located at the Yingxiu-Beichuan and the Hanwang rupture zones, and characterized by sinistral-slip thrusting. Surface ruptures occur generally along the previous active faults and raise the elevated landforms again, indicating that earthquakes in the Longmenshan region had repeatedly occurred on the same fault belt and accumulation of numerous earthquakes including strong events like the MS 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake result in the formation of the present Longmenshan Mountains. The analysis of the co-seismic fault planes and striation reveals the Wenchuan earthquake is the compound result of two rupture processes. Thrusting and dextral strike-slip dominates the early and later stages, and this is in agreement with the results of seismic wave inversion (Chen et al., 2008; Ji, 2008; Wang et al., 2008). The southern segment of the surface rupture zone (Yingxiu-Qingping segment) suggests two different processes, while the northern only reflects the second event. By comparing the long-term slip rate with the co-seismic displacement, it is estimated that the recurrence intervals of great earthquakes like the MS 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake can be 3000~6000 years. The comparative researches on the West Kunlun, the Altun, the East Kunlun and the Longmenshan Mountains reveal that the similar transpressional structural features -the oblique thrusting -is the dominative mechanism for uplift of surrounding mountains in the Tibetan Plateau.
Beyond the Surface: Uncovering the Unprotected Components of Android Against Overlay Attack

—Overlay is a notable user interface feature in the Android system, which allows an app to draw over other apps’ windows. While overlay enhances user experience and allows concurrent app interaction, it has been extensively abused for malicious purposes, such as "tapjacking", leading to so-called overlay attacks. In order to combat this threat, Google introduced a dedicated window flag SYSTEM_FLAG_HIDE_NON_SYSTEM_OVERLAY_WINDOWS to protect critical system apps’ windows against overlay attacks. Unfortunately, the adequacy of such protection in the Android system remains unstudied, with a noticeable absence of clear usage guidelines. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we conduct the first systematic study on the unprotected windows of system apps against overlay attacks. We propose a comprehensive guideline and then design and develop a new tool named OverlayChecker to identify the missing protections in Android system apps. To verify the uncovered issues, we also design and create Proof-of-Concept apps. After applying OverlayChecker to 8 commercial Android systems on 4 recently released Android versions, we totally discovered 49 vulnerable system apps’ windows. We reported our findings to the mobile vendors, including Google, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Honor. At the time of writing, 15 of them have been confirmed. 5 CVEs have been assigned, and 3 of them are rated high severity. We also received bug bounty rewards from these mobile vendors.
Environmental injustice in the onondaga lake waterscape, New York State, USA

This paper examines two interrelated cases of environmental injustice and social mobilisation in the Onondaga lake watershed in Central New York State, USA: (1) the case of the Onondaga Nation, an indigenous people whose rights to, and uses of, water and other resources have been severely reduced through historical processes of Euro-American settlement and industrial development; and (2) the case of the city of Syracuse, New York’s Southside neighbourhood, a low-income community of colour, where a sewage treatment facility was constructed as part of a broader effort to remediate the effects of pollution in Onondaga lake. The Onondaga Nation and the Southside neighbourhood are connected by Onondaga creek, which flows through each before joining Onondaga lake. These communities are also linked by shared histories of marginalisation and environmental injustice. Taken together, the cases demonstrate the temporal and spatial continuities of social relations of power, and their embodiment in water resources. Conceptually, the paper brings together the literatures of environmental justice and the political ecology of water resources. In doing so, we employ the concept of waterscape as an analytical lens to examine processes of marginalisation and social exclusion in the Onondaga lake watershed. The waterscape concept, and the political ecology of water resources literature more generally, have much to contribute to the study of water-related environmental (in)justice.
Isolation of Bacterial Strains that Produce Biosurfactant for Industrial and Medical Use

The aim of this study is to treat and value petroleum waste by determining if specific microbes can degrade the hydrocarbons (with emulsifying potential) in samples polluted by this waste. On an additional topic, studies on the characteristics and isolation of hydrocarbonoclastic soil bacteria are identified oil quagmire obtained from containers for storage and abandoned refineries for oil. To do this, a wide range of bacterial species have been isolated from oil quagmire samples polluted by hydrocarbures. Isolation permitted us to purify 88 isolates, and an additional evaluation of their emulsifying ability using the E24 test permitted us to choose seven of the best-performing isolates with significant emulsifying capacity.
DynPRE: Protocol Reverse Engineering via Dynamic Inference

—Automatic protocol reverse engineering is essential for various security applications. While many existing techniques achieve this task by analyzing static network traces, they face increasing challenges due to their dependence on high-quality samples. This paper introduces D YN PRE, a protocol reverse engineering tool that exploits the interactive capabilities of protocol servers to obtain more semantic information and additional trafﬁc for dynamic inference. D YN PRE ﬁrst processes the initial input network traces and learns the rules for interacting with the server in different contexts based on session-speciﬁc identiﬁer detection and adaptive message rewriting. It then applies exploratory request crafting to obtain semantic information and supplementary samples and performs real-time analysis. Our evaluation on 12 widely used protocols shows that D YN PRE identiﬁes ﬁelds with a perfection score of 0.50 and infers message types with a V-measure of 0.94, signiﬁcantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods like Netzob, Netplier, FieldHunter, BinaryInferno, and Nemesys, which achieve average perfection and V-measure scores of (0.15, 0.72), (0.16, 0.73), (0.15, 0.83), (0.15, -), and (0.31, -), respectively. Furthermore, case studies on unknown protocols highlight the effectiveness of D YN PRE in real-world applications.
Deep-learning-based target screening and similarity search for the predicted inhibitors of the pathways in Parkinson's disease

Herein, a two-step de novo approach was developed for the prediction of piperine targets and another prediction of similar (piperine) compounds from a small molecule library using a deep-learning method. Deep-learning and neural-network approaches were used for target prediction, similarity searches, and validation. The present approach was trained on records containing the data. The model attained an overall accuracy of around 87.5%, where the training and test set was kept as 70% and 30% (17 226/40 197), respectively. This method predicted two targets (MAO-A and MAO-B) and 101 compounds as piperine derivatives. MAO-A and MAO-B are important drug targets in Parkinson's disease. Validation of this method was also performed by considering piperine and its targets (monoamine oxidase A and B) using molecular docking, dynamics simulation and post-simulation analysis of all the selected compounds. Rasagiline, lazabemide, and selegiline were selected as controls, which are already FDA-approved drugs against these targets. Molecular docking studies of the FDA-approved drugs and the compounds we predicted using DL and neural networks were carried out against MAO-A and MAO-B. Using the molecular docking's scoring function, molecular dynamics simulation and free energy calculations as extended validation methods, it was observed that the compounds predicted herein possessed excellent inhibitory effects against the selected targets. Thus, deep learning may play a very effective role in predicting the potential compounds, their targets and can play an expanded role in computer-aided drug approaches.
Middle to late Eocene exhumation of the Greater Himalayan Sequence in the Central Himalayas: Progressive accretion from the Indian plate

We investigated a contractional shear zone located in central Nepal, known as Kalopani shear zone. This high-temperature shear zone triggered the early exhumation of the metamorphic core in the Himalayan belt and deeply affected the tectono-metamorphic history of the crystalline rocks soon after the collisional stage. Pseudosection modeling and inverse geothermobarometry reveal that rocks involved in the Kalopani shear zone experienced pressure-temperature conditions between 0.60 and 0.85 GPa and 600 and 660 °C. U-Th-Pb in situ laser ablation−inductively coupled plasma−mass spectrometry and sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe dating on monazite points to retrograde metamorphism related to the Kalopani shear zone starting from ca. 41 to 30 Ma. The kinematics of the Kalopani shear zone and associated erosion and/or tectonics caused the middle-late Eocene exhumation of the Greater Himalayan Sequence in the hanging wall of the Kalopani shear zone at least 9 m.y. before the activities of the middle tectonic-metamorphic discontinuity in the Greater Himalayan Sequence (High Himalayan discontinuity), the Main Central thrust, and the South Tibetan detachment. Structural data, metamorphic conditions, and geochronology from the Kalopani shear zone, compared to those of other major tectonic discontinuities active within the Greater Himalayan Sequence in the Kali Gandaki valley, indicate that shear deformation and exhumation were not synchronous all over the Greater Himalayan Sequence but migrated downward and southward at different lower levels. These processes caused the exhumation of the hanging wall rocks of the activated shear zones. The main consequence is that exhumation has been driven since the middle-late Eocene by an in-sequence shearing mechanism progressively involving new slices of the Indian crust, starting from the metamorphic core of the orogen and later involving the outer portions of the belt. This challenges the common view of exhumation of the Greater Himalayan Sequence mainly driven by the coupled activity of Main Central thrust and South Tibetan detachment between ca. 23 and 17 Ma.
Financial statements’ reliability affects firms’ performance: A case of Vietnam

This paper aims to estimate the effect of the reliability of financial statements on listed firms’ performance in Vietnam, especially on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange, from 2015 to 2022. Based on International Financial Reporting Standards, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and theories, reliability is a key attribute of information quality in financial statements. Besides, using the quantitative method of feasible generalized least squares (FGLS), the findings show that reliability positively affects listed firms’ performance with a confidence interval of 95%. On the platform of agency theory, the reliability of financial statements is considered a tool to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of managers and the board of directors to external users, while stakeholder theory considers the advantages of the disclosure of reliable financial statements in terms of gaining performance.
Outcomes of Functional Endoscopic Sinus Surgery in Chronic Rhinosinusitis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) is a prevalent health problem that affects many people around the world and can require surgical intervention if conservative therapy fails. Functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS) is a minimally invasive surgical procedure commonly used to manage CRS. The success of FESS depends on various factors, and larger studies are necessary to determine its efficacy in managing CRS in this population. This systematic review and meta-analysis of the available literature aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of FESS in the Middle East. We followed the standards outlined by PRISMA and the Cochrane Handbook for systematic reviews. The primary outcome of interest was the quality of life (QOL), and the secondary outcome was the recurrence of CRS. This systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted, and sensitivity analysis was performed to examine the robustness of the results. Six studies were included. The review found that the QOL significantly improved (p < 0.001). Two studies reported recurrence of CRS after FESS, and data showed that the recurrence of CRS after surgery was 6%. FESS is an effective intervention for CRS, but further research is needed on recurrence rates.
Towards Automated Regulation Analysis for Effective Privacy Compliance

—Privacy regulations are being introduced and amended around the globe to effectively regulate the processing of consumer data. These regulations are often analyzed to fulfill compliance mandates and to aid the design of practical systems that improve consumer privacy. However, at present, this is done manually, making the task error-prone, while also incurring significant time, effort, and cost for companies. This paper describes the design and implementation of ARC, a framework that transforms unstructured and complex regulatory text into a structured representation, the ARC tuple(s), which can be queried to assist in the analysis and understanding of regulations. We demonstrate ARC’s effectiveness in extracting three forms of tuples with a high F-1 score (avg. 82.1% across all three) using four major privacy regulations: CCPA, GDPR, VCDPA, and PIPEDA. We then build ARCBert that identifies semantically similar phrases across regulations, enabling compliance analysts to identify common requirements. We run ARC on 16 additional privacy regulations and identify 1,556 ARC tuples and clusters of semantically similar phrases. Finally, we extend ARC to evaluate the compliance of privacy policies by comparing it against the disclosure requirements in the four regulations. Our empirical evaluation with the privacy policies of S&P 500 companies finds 476 missing disclosures, which when manually validated, result in 71.05% true positives, as well as the discovery of 288 additional missing disclosures from the partial matches identified by ARC.