Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Authenticated Encryption Mode IAPM using SHA-3's Public Random Permutation

We study instantiating the random permutation of the blockcipher mode of operation IAPM (Integrity-Aware Parallelizable Mode) with the public random permutation of Keccak, on which the draft standard SHA-3 is built. IAPM and the related mode OCB are single-pass highly parallelizable authenticated-encryption modes, and while they were originally proven secure in the private random permutation model, Kurosawa has shown that they are also secure in the public random permutation model assuming the whitening keys are uniformly chosen with double the usual entropy. In this paper, we show a general composability result that shows that the whitening key can be obtained from the usual entropy source by a key-derivation function which is itself built on Keccak. We stress that this does not follow directly from the usual indifferentiability of key-derivation function constructions from Random Oracles. We also show that a simple and general construction, again employing Keccak, can also be used to make the IAPM scheme keydependent-message secure. Finally, implementations on modern AMD-64 architecture supporting 128-bit SIMD instructions, and not supporting the native AES instructions, show that IAPM with Keccak runs three times faster than IAPM with AES.
Performance Analysis of a multi-mode waveguide based optical disc readout system

In this paper we propose a method to improve the optical resolution for reading out optical discs, without making the spot size on the disc smaller than the diffraction limit. The idea is to reconstruct the bit pattern from the complete field profile (including amplitude and phase) of the light reflected from the disc. Phase and amplitude information are measured by picking up the wave front into different modes of a bimodal waveguide. Once picked up, these modes can be split by a photonic integrated circuit to be measured by separate detectors. By combining the information from the responses from the different modes, the bit error rate can be improved substantially.
Effect of the Addition of TiO2 Nanoparticles on the Sinterability of a Glass Belonging to the LZSA Glass-Ceramic System

In this work aqueous ceramic suspensions were prepared from a parent glass-ceramic powder (3.8 μm) belonging to the LZSA (Li2O-ZrO2-SiO2-Al2O3) system without or with additions of different volume fractions (1.0-7.5%) of TiO2 nanoparticles (25 nm). The obtained suspensions were rheologically characterized so that stable suspensions were defined e formed by slip casting. The obtained compacts were sintered (850-950°C/60 min) and their green and sintered densities were determined and related to linear shrinkage measurements. The results showed that samples sintered at 950oC for 60 min with 1.0% TiO2 addicted presented linear shrinkage of 12% and relative densities of 97%.
Positivity bias in past and future episodic thinking: Relationship with anxiety, depression, and retrieval-induced forgetting

Positivity biases in autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking are considered important in mental wellbeing and are reduced in anxiety and depression. The inhibitory processes underlying retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) have been proposed to contribute to these biases. This investigation found reduced positivity in past and future thinking to be associated with reduced memory specificity alongside greater levels of anxiety, depression, and rumination. Most notably, however, RIF was found to significantly predict memory valence. This indicates that RIF may be important in maintaining such biases, facilitating the forgetting of negative memories when a positive item is actively retrieved.
Title Effect of clinical and virological parameters on the level of neutralizing antibody against pandemic influenza A virus H 1 N 1 2009

Background. Little is known about the antibody response in natural infection by the novel 2009 influenza A (H1N1) virus and its relationship with clinical and virological parameters. The relative lack of background neutralizing antibody against this novel virus provides a unique opportunity for understanding this issue. Methods. Case patients presenting with influenza-like illness who were positive for the pandemic H1 gene by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction were identified. The serum antibody response was assayed by neutralizing antibody titer (NAT) against the virus in 881 convalescent donors. We retrospectively analyzed clinical parameters and viral load. Results. Ninety percent of the 881 convalescent donors had seroprotective titer of 1:40 or greater. The geometric mean titer of donors with convalescent NAT measured between day 21 and 42 was 1:101.1. Multivariate analysis by ordinal regression showed that pneumonia) were the 2 independent factors associated P p . 046 with a higher level of convalescent NAT. Being afebrile on influenza presentation was associated with subsequent poor NAT (! 1:40) response (). A positive correlation between the nasopharyngeal viral load on presentation P p . 04 and the convalescent NAT was demonstrated (Spearman correlation r, 0.238;). P p . 026 Conclusions. About 10% of these convalescent patients do not have a seroprotective NAT and may benefit from vaccination to prevent reinfection. The convalescent NAT correlated well with the initial viral load and was independently associated with severity of the viral illness, including pneumonia. The findings provide both the clinical and virological markers for identifying potential convalescent plasma donors with high serum NAT, which can be used to produce hyperimmune intravenous immunoglobulin in a randomized treatment trial for patients with severe pandemic H1N1 infection.
Covert Wireless Communications With Channel Inversion Power Control in Rayleigh Fading

In this work, we adopt channel inversion power control (CIPC) to achieve covert communications aided by a full-duplex receiver. Specifically, the transmitter varies the power and phase of transmitted signals as per the channel to the receiver, such that the receiver can decode these signals without knowing the channel state information. This eliminates the required feedback from the transmitter to the receiver, which aids hiding the transmitter from a warden. The truncated CIPC and conventional CIPC schemes are proposed and examined, where for truncated CIPC covert transmission ceases when the channel quality from the transmitter to the receiver is low, while for conventional CIPC covert transmission always occurs regardless of this channel quality. We examine their performance in terms of the achieved effective covert throughput (ECT), which quantifies the amount of information that the transmitter can reliably convey to the receiver, subject to the constraint that the warden's detection error probability is no less than some specific value. Our examination shows that the truncated CIPC scheme can outperform the conventional CIPC scheme due to this constraint.
A Generic Mitigation Framework against Cross-VM Covert Channels

In recent years, many cross-VM covert channels have been discovered in cloud computing, causing serious security concerns. For such covert channels, some mitigation schemes have been proposed, but usually one mitigation scheme aims at a specific covert channel, which may be inefficient in defending against potential new attacks. In this paper, we propose a generic solution to mitigate the risk of a broad class of timing-based cross-VM covert channels. The design is motivated by our finding that the capacity of most timing-based cross-VM covert channels highly depends on the co-run probability among VMs, where the co-run probability depends not only on how VMs are assigned to servers, but also how VMs are scheduled on a single server, which is related to managing the vCPUs assigned to each VM. We find that the VM co-run probability can be reduced when the number of vCPUs increases, but it also causes extra system overhead in resource utilization. In this paper, we propose a generic VM provisioning and VM scheduling solution to jointly minimize the co-run probability among VMs, meanwhile, maintaining high resource utilization. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed scheduling algorithm can mitigate the risk of timing-based cross-VM covert channel with lower system overhead. We also conduct simulation of VM provisioning which shows that the proposed solution can achieve the balance between high resource utilization and low risk of information leakage caused by cross-VM covert channels.
An enhanced Gabor filter-based segmentation algorithm for fingerprint recognition systems

An important step in fingerprint recognition is the segmentation of the region of interest. In this paper, we present an enhanced approach for fingerprint segmentation based on the response of eight oriented Gabor filters. The performance of the algorithm has been evaluated in terms of decision error trade-off curves of an overall verification system. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method.
Slit Lamp-Based Ocular Scoring Systems in Toxicology and Drug Development: A Literature Survey.

PURPOSE To present a survey of the features of published slit lamp-based scoring systems and their applicability in the context of modern ocular toxicology and drug development. METHODS References describing original or modified slit lamp-based scoring systems for human or veterinary clinical patients or in investigative or toxicologic research were collected following a comprehensive literature review using textbooks and online publication searches. Each system's indications and features were compiled to facilitate comparison. RESULTS Literature review identified 138 original or modified scoring systems. Most (48%) were published for evaluation of the ocular surface, 34% for the general anterior segment, and 18% for the lens. Most systems were described for assessment of human patients (50%) and small albino laboratory species such as rabbits (19%), rats (12%), and mice (8%). Systems described for pigmented laboratory species and for larger species such as dogs, cats, pigs, and nonhuman primates (NHPs) were comparatively underrepresented. No systems described a lens scoring scheme specific to the dog, cat, pig, or NHP. Scoring schemes for aqueous and vitreous cells were infrequently described for laboratory species. CONCLUSIONS Many slit lamp-based scoring systems have been published, but the features of each differ and complicate translation of findings between different species. Use and interpretation of any scoring system in toxicology and drug development must be done with awareness of the limitations of the system being used.
What Theories and Methods From Relationship Research Can Contribute to Sex Research

Sexual and relationship satisfaction tend to be closely linked in the context of romantic relationships. Understanding how sexual processes influence relationships and how aspects of the relationship influence a couple’s sex life can provide insight into the maintenance of sexual desire and satisfaction over time. In this article, we review how theories and methods that form the foundation for relationship research have made—and will continue to make—sexuality research a stronger, more theoretical, and methodologically sophisticated science. We discuss the key theories that have been used to advance our understanding of who is more likely to be sexually satisfied in relationships, when sex is most satisfying, and how couples can have more satisfying sex lives and relationships. We then provide an overview of dyadic and repeated-measures designs and demonstrate how the use of these types of research methods allows relationship and sexuality researchers to answer novel and nuanced questions about how romantic partners influence each other, as well as how sexual processes unfold in couples’ daily lives and over time. Throughout the review, we highlight what we see as fruitful directions for future research at the intersection of sexuality and relationships.
Detecting Inconsistencies in JavaScript MVC Applications

Higher demands for more reliable and maintainable JavaScript-based web applications have led to the recent development of MVC (Model-View-Controller) frameworks. One of the main advantages of using these frameworks is that they abstract out DOM API method calls, which are one of the leading causes of web application faults, due to their often complicated interaction patterns. However, MVC frameworks are susceptible to inconsistencies between the identifiers and types of variables and functions used throughout the application. In response to this problem, we introduce a formal consistency model for web applications made using MVC frameworks. We propose an approach -- called Aurebesh -- that automatically detects inconsistencies in such applications. We evaluate Aurebesh by conducting a fault injection experiment and by running it on real applications. Our results show that Aurebesh is accurate, with an overall recall of 96.1% and a precision of 100%. It is also useful in detecting bugs, allowing us to find 15 real-world bugs in applications built on Angular JS, a popular MVC framework.
Decoding with Value Networks for Neural Machine Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has become a popular technology in recent years, and beam search is its de facto decoding method due to the shrunk search space and reduced computational complexity. However, since it only searches for local optima at each time step through one-step forward looking, it usually cannot output the best target sentence. Inspired by the success and methodology of AlphaGo, in this paper we propose using a prediction network to improve beam search, which takes the source sentence $x$, the currently available decoding output $y_1,\cdots, y_{t-1}$ and a candidate word $w$ at step $t$ as inputs and predicts the long-term value (e.g., BLEU score) of the partial target sentence if it is completed by the NMT model. Following the practice in reinforcement learning, we call this prediction network \emph{value network}. Specifically, we propose a recurrent structure for the value network, and train its parameters from bilingual data. During the test time, when choosing a word $w$ for decoding, we consider both its conditional probability given by the NMT model and its long-term value predicted by the value network. Experiments show that such an approach can significantly improve the translation accuracy on several translation tasks.
Suppression by cyclosporin A of anti-GBM nephritis in rats.

The suppressive effect of cyclosporin A (CyA) on the development of glomerulonephritis was evaluated in rats with either original- or crescentic-type anti-glomerular basement membrane (GBM) nephritis. CyA (2.5, 10 or 20 mg/kg) was given p.o. daily to original-type anti-GBM nephritic rats for 10 days from the day after the injection of anti-GBM serum. The development of the nephritis was dose-dependently suppressed by CyA before the production of specific antibody against rabbit gamma-globulin (the heterologous phase). In addition, CyA suppressed glomerular infiltration of leukocyte subsets (leukocyte with common antigen, T cell, helper T cell, suppressor/cytotoxic T cell, macrophage/monocyte). CyA was given p.o. daily to crescentic-type anti-GBM nephritic rats for 10 days from the 10th day after the injection of anti-GBM serum. CyA-administration caused a distinct suppression of the deterioration of nephritis during the autologous phase. In addition, CyA markedly suppressed the antibody production. The above data indicate that CyA has a beneficial effect on anti-GBM nephritis, and the antinephritic action of this agent may be due to the inhibition of glomerular infiltration of leukocyte subsets as well as the suppression of the antibody production.
Formation of short chain fatty acids by the gut microbiota and their impact on human metabolism

ABSTRACT The formation of SCFA is the result of a complex interplay between diet and the gut microbiota within the gut lumen environment. The discovery of receptors, across a range of cell and tissue types for which short chain fatty acids SCFA appear to be the natural ligands, has led to increased interest in SCFA as signaling molecules between the gut microbiota and the host. SCFA represent the major carbon flux from the diet through the gut microbiota to the host and evidence is emerging for a regulatory role of SCFA in local, intermediary and peripheral metabolism. However, a lack of well-designed and controlled human studies has hampered our understanding of the significance of SCFA in human metabolic health. This review aims to pull together recent findings on the role of SCFA in human metabolism to highlight the multi-faceted role of SCFA on different metabolic systems.
Brief Report: HIV-1 gp120 T-Cell Responses Correspond to Infection Outcomes in the Global iPrEx Chemoprophylaxis Trial

Abstract: Association of HIV-1–specific T-cell responses to infection risk in seronegative individuals is controversial. We quantified and phenotypically characterized gp120-specific T-cell responses in HIV-1 exposed, but uninfected subjects enrolled in the global Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Initiative (iPrEx) chemoprophylaxis trial. IFN&ggr; ELISpot responses were detected in 24% of subjects irrespective of infection outcome. HIV-1 gp120 envelope-specific T-cell responses were more uniformly IFN-&ggr;+TNF-&agr;+Mip-1&bgr;+ in persistently seronegative subjects relative to subjects who later seroconverted (median frequency of 76.5% and 66.5%, respectively). IFN&ggr; responses targeted the V2 loop for subjects who remained seronegative. HIV-1 gp120 envelope V2 loop-specific CD8+ T-cell responses may help to protect against HIV-1 acquisition.
Template ( Version 1 . 2 – December 21 , 2009 ) Click here to check for newer templates Physical Outcrop Characteristics of the Mawrth MSL Candidate Landing Site

Background: One of the candidate landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory is in the Mawrth region of Mars. The candidate landing ellipse is located on highly cratered terrain with extensive bedrock outcrop. Diverse hydrous minerals have been detected from orbit, providing strong motivation for sending a landed mission to this area. However, models for the accumulation of bedrock in the area are poorly constrained. Method: To evaluate the physical characteristics of light-toned bedrock in Mawrth area, I described features from and mapped relationships on HiRISE images, anaglyphs, and DTMs in the context of
Long‐Term Risk of Myocardial Infarction Compared to Recurrent Stroke After Transient Ischemic Attack and Ischemic Stroke: Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis

Background Uncertainties remain about the current risk of myocardial infarction (MI) after ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack. Methods and Results We undertook a systematic review to estimate the long‐term risk of MI, compared to recurrent stroke, with temporal trends in ischemic stroke/transient ischemic attack patients. Annual risks and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) of MI and recurrent stroke were estimated using random‐effect meta‐analyses. We calculated incidence ratios of MI/recurrent stroke, for fatal and nonfatal events, using similar analyses. Rate ratios for MI in patients with potential risk factors compared to those without were calculated using Poisson regression. A total of 58 studies (131 299 patients) with a mean (range) follow‐up of 3.5 (1.0‐10.0) years were included. The risk of MI was 1.67%/y (95% CI 1.36‐1.98, P het<0.001 for heterogeneity) and decreased over time (P int=0.021); 96% of the heterogeneity between studies was explained by study design, study period, follow‐up duration, mean age, proportion of patients on antithrombotic therapy, and incident versus combined ischemic stroke/transient ischemic attack. The risk of recurrent stroke was 4.26%/y (95% CI 3.43‐5.09, P het<0.001), with no change over time (P int=0.63). The risk of fatal MI was half the risk of recurrent strokes ending in fatality (incidence ratio=0.51, 95% CI 0.14‐0.89, P het=0.58). The risk of nonfatal MI was 75% smaller than the risk of recurrent nonfatal stroke (incidence ratio=0.25, 95%CI 0.02‐0.50, P het=0.68). Male sex, hypertension, coronary and peripheral artery diseases were associated with a doubled risk of MI. Conclusions After ischemic stroke/transient ischemic attack, the risk of MI is currently <2%/y, and recurrent stroke is a more common cause of death than MI.
Genetic Variation and Exchange in Trypanosoma cruzi Isolates from the United States

Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, is a multiclonal parasite with high levels of genetic diversity and broad host and geographic ranges. Molecular characterization of South American isolates of T. cruzi has demonstrated homologous recombination and nuclear hybridization, as well as the presence of 6 main genetic clusters or “discrete typing units” (DTUs). Few studies have extensively investigated such exchange events and genetic diversity in North American isolates. In the current study, we genetically characterized over 50 US isolates from wildlife reservoirs (e.g., raccoons, opossums, armadillos, skunks), domestic dogs, humans, nonhuman primates, and reduviid vectors from nine states (TX, CA, OK, SC, FL, GA, MD, LA, TN) using a multilocus sequencing method. Single nucleotide polymorphisms were identified in sequences of the mismatch-repair class 2 (MSH2) and Tc52 genes. Typing based on the two genes often paralleled genotyping by classic methodologies using mini-exon and 18S and 24Sα rRNA genes. Evidence for genetic exchange was obtained by comparing sequence phylogenies of nuclear and mitochondrial gene targets, dihydrofolate reductase-thymidylate synthase (DHFR-TS) and the cytochrome oxidase subunit II- NADH dehydrogenase subunit I region (COII-ND1), respectively. We observed genetic exchange in several US isolates as demonstrated by incongruent mitochondrial and nuclear genes phylogenies, which confirms a previous finding of a single genetic exchange event in a Florida isolate. The presence of SNPs and evidence of genetic exchange illustrates that strains from the US are genetically diverse, even though only two phylogenetic lineages have been identified in this region.
Facile Fabrication of Boron-Doped Titania Nanopowders by Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapor Synthesis Route and its Photocatalytic Activity

The Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapor Synthesis (APCVS) route is a process that can be used for the synthesis of dopednanocrystalline powders with very small crystallite sizes having a narrow particle size distribution and high purity. In this study, APCVS technique was used to prepare boron-doped titania nanopowders. The effects of temperature, borate flow rate and water flow rate on the amount of doped boron were studied. The resultant powders were characterized by inductively coupled plasma (ICP), Xray diffraction (XRD), nitrogen adsorption technique (BET), UVvisible DRS spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The optimum boron precursor flow rate was 80 sccm. The highest amount of doped boron was attained when water flow rate was 900 sccm. In comparison to the pristine TiO2, the boron-doped TiO2 nanoparticles showed blue-shift in band-gap energy of the samples.