Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Primordial Economics of Cheating: Trading Skill for Glory or Vital Steps to Evolved Play?

In a period marked by cultural, industrial and technological convergences of new media platforms globally, what constitutes ‘Situated play’? One of the key aspects of the global digital industries has been the increasing importance of locality in determining modes of game play. Far from homogenising game play, globalisation has resulted in “disjuncture” and “difference” at the level of the local. Take, for example, the considerable successes of the Massively Multiplayer Online scene; despite its movement towards the idea of the connected gaming civilisation model, many MMO are not global but, rather, played by certain communities that share linguistic, socio-cultural or political economy similarities. A considerably poignant example would be the way in which different aesthetics appeal to cultural contexts. The formulation of these distinctive taste cultures are marked by what Pierre Bourdieu noted as modes of cultural (productions of knowledges), social and economic capital. These types of knowledges effect and impact modes of game play as well as “appreciation” of types of skills and knowledges. So how can we conceptualise these productions of localised game play? One way to understand some of the nuances of the local and how it impacts certain modes of game play is through the rubric of “ethics”. Can we speak of right or wrong behaviour? Who determines it? Is it the companies, the producers, the gaming community, or the socio-political context that governs and moderates modes of behaviour? In this paper, I will explore the role of ethics in gaming and how it relates to cultural relativity and situated play. The paper will outline a compact historical account of the definitions of “cheating” within the realm of the digital and how online gaming has revolutionised some of these precepts. In order to do so I will explore the evolution of cheating and its newfound degrees of acceptance within the contemporary global online gaming community. I will firstly outline some of the ways in which ethics have been conceptualised in game play, following this; a look at a case study of Melbourne MMO players and their definitions of the “ethics” in games through the rubric of cheating. The case study of MMO users in Melbourne will consist of users from over 10 ethnic backgrounds. The sample study will ask users about their definition of cheating and right or wrong game play so that we may mediate on some of saliencies and nascent socio-cultural dimensions of play and locality.
A Comprehensive Look at Financial Volatility Prediction by Economic Variables

We investigate if asset return volatility is predictable by macroeconomic and financial variables and shed light on the economic drivers of financial volatility. Our approach is distinct due to its comprehensiveness: First, we employ a data-rich forecast methodology to handle a large set of potential predictors in a Bayesian Model Averaging approach, and, second, we take a look at multiple asset classes (equities, foreign exchange, bonds, and commodities) over long time spans. We find that proxies for credit risk and funding (il)liquidity consistently show up as common predictors of volatility across asset classes. Variables capturing time-varying risk premia also perform well as predictors of volatility. While forecasts by macro-finance augmented models also achieve forecasting gains out-of-sample relative to autoregressive benchmarks, the performance varies across asset classes and over time.
Audio super-resolution using analysis dictionary learning

Super-resolution is an important problem in signal processing. It aims to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) signal from a low-resolution (LR) input. We consider the super-resolution problem for audio signals in the time-frequency domain and propose a method using analysis dictionary learning. The input to our proposed method is the LR spectrogram matrix of an audio signal, where some rows corresponding to high-frequency information are lost. First, an analysis dictionary is learned from the spectrogram of some related audio signals. The learned dictionary is then applied in an ℓ1-norm regularization term for the reconstruction of the HR spectrogram. Experimental results with piano signals demonstrate the advantage of the learned dictionaries in reconstructing HR spectrograms.
Through a glass darkly: facial wrinkles affect our processing of emotion in the elderly

The correct interpretation of emotional expressions is crucial for social life. However, emotions in old relative to young faces are recognized less well. One reason for this may be decreased signal clarity of older faces due to morphological changes, such as wrinkles and folds, obscuring facial displays of emotions. Across three experiments, the present research investigates how misattributions of emotions to elderly faces impair emotion discrimination. In a preliminary task, neutral expressions were perceived as more expressive in old than in young faces by human raters (Experiment 1A) and an automatic system for emotion recognition (Experiment 1B). Consequently, task difficulty was higher for old faces relative to young faces in a visual search task (Experiment 2). Specifically, participants detected old faces expressing negative emotions less accurately and slower among neutral faces of their peers than young faces among neutral faces of their peers. Thus, we argue that age-related changes in facial features are the most plausible explanation for the differences in emotion perception between young and old faces. These findings are of relevance for the social interchange with the elderly, especially when multiple older individuals are present.
In-patient, short-term group psychotherapy – a therapeutic option for Bundeswehr soldiers?

Objective: This study is to assess the efficacy of short-term group psychotherapy rooted in depth psychology for Bundeswehr soldiers suffering from depressive, neurotic, stress, or personality disorders. Method: 103 participants in the in-patient, closed group setting were evaluated prospectively and compared with a non-randomized waitlisted control group. Results: In all relevant SCL-90-R (Symptom-Check-List-90) and MMPI-K (Minnesota-Multiphasic-Personality-Inventory short-form) scales therapy resulted in significant improvements as compared with the initial values. The control group did not show any significant changes, the therapy group was significantly superior to the control group in the scales of MMPI-K and the GSI-Scale of the SCL-90-R. For soldiers with a stress-reactive disorder (F43), no differences in efficacy could be identified compared with the other diagnosis groups. Conclusion: The results were considered to indicate that in-patient, short-term group psychotherapy may, in combination with additional setting components, be helpful in improving psychological symptoms in German soldiers. The indication range of group therapy offered to Bundeswehr soldiers should be expanded to also include primary prophylaxis and the treatment of mental-health problems following deployments abroad, if applicable.
The affinity purification and characterization of ATP synthase complexes from mitochondria

The mitochondrial F1-ATPase inhibitor protein, IF1, inhibits the hydrolytic, but not the synthetic activity of the F-ATP synthase, and requires the hydrolysis of ATP to form the inhibited complex. In this complex, the α-helical inhibitory region of the bound IF1 occupies a deep cleft in one of the three catalytic interfaces of the enzyme. Its N-terminal region penetrates into the central aqueous cavity of the enzyme and interacts with the γ-subunit in the enzyme's rotor. The intricacy of forming this complex and the binding mode of the inhibitor endow IF1 with high specificity. This property has been exploited in the development of a highly selective affinity procedure for purifying the intact F-ATP synthase complex from mitochondria in a single chromatographic step by using inhibitor proteins with a C-terminal affinity tag. The inhibited complex was recovered with residues 1–60 of bovine IF1 with a C-terminal green fluorescent protein followed by a His-tag, and the active enzyme with the same inhibitor with a C-terminal glutathione-S-transferase domain. The wide applicability of the procedure has been demonstrated by purifying the enzyme complex from bovine, ovine, porcine and yeast mitochondria. The subunit compositions of these complexes have been characterized. The catalytic properties of the bovine enzyme have been studied in detail. Its hydrolytic activity is sensitive to inhibition by oligomycin, and the enzyme is capable of synthesizing ATP in vesicles in which the proton-motive force is generated from light by bacteriorhodopsin. The coupled enzyme has been compared by limited trypsinolysis with uncoupled enzyme prepared by affinity chromatography. In the uncoupled enzyme, subunits of the enzyme's stator are degraded more rapidly than in the coupled enzyme, indicating that uncoupling involves significant structural changes in the stator region.
Degradation of a quantum reference frame

We investigate the degradation of reference frames (RFs), treated as dynamical quantum systems, and quantify their longevity as a resource for performing tasks in quantum information processing. We adopt an operational measure of an RF's longevity, namely, the number of measurements that can be made against it with a certain error tolerance. We investigate two distinct types of RF: a reference direction, realized by a spin-j system, and a phase reference, realized by an oscillator mode with bounded energy. For both cases, we show that our measure of longevity increases quadratically with the size of the reference system and is therefore non-additive. For instance, the number of measurements for which a directional RF consisting of N parallel spins can be put to use scales as N2. Our results quantify the extent to which microscopic or mesoscopic RFs may be used for repeated, high-precision measurements, without needing to be reset—a question that is important for some implementations of quantum computing. We illustrate our results using the proposed single-spin measurement scheme of magnetic resonance force microscopy.
An Overview of Location Semantics Technologies and Applications

A localization system is a coordinate system for describing the world, organizing the world, and controlling the world. Without a coordinate system, we cannot specify the world in mathematical forms; we cannot regulate processes that may involve spatial collisions; we cannot even automate a robot for physical actions. This paper provides an overview of indoor localization technologies, popular models for extracting semantics from location data, approaches for associating semantic information and location data, and applications that may be enabled with location semantics. To make the presentation easy to understand, we will use a museum scenario to explain the pros and cons of different technologies and models. More specifically, we will first explore users' needs in a museum scenario. Based on these needs, we will then discuss advantages and disadvantages of using different localization technologies to meet these needs. From these discussions, we can highlight gaps between real application requirements and existing technologies, and point out promising localization research directions. Similarly, we will also discuss context information required by different applications and explore models and ontologies for connecting users, objects, and environment factors with semantics. By identifying gaps between various models and real application requirements, we can draw a roadmap for future location semantics research.
Health Inequality, Education and Medical Innovation

Recent studies suggest that health inequalities across socio-economic groups in the US are large and have been growing. We hypothesize that, as in other, non-health contexts, this pattern occurs because more educated people are better able than to take advantage of technological advances in medicine than are the less educated. We test this hypothesis by relating education gradients in mortality with measures medical innovation. We focus on overall mortality and cancer mortality, examining both the incidence of cancer and survival conditional on disease incidence. We find evidence supporting the hypothesis that education gradients are steeper for diseases with more innovation.
Resource Allocation for Education: An Evolving and Promising Base for Policy-Oriented Research

For too many years, those with interests in resource allocation for education have worked in isolation from mainstream scholarly efforts within education administration. The term "resource" has been con­ strued narrowly to deal with central administrative matters that lend themselves to dollar metrics. This practice allows resource allocation issues to become the province of those teaching relatively self­ contained courses in educational finance and business administration. The resulting compartmentalization is unfortunate because it gener­ ates barriers that limit the use of a potentially important theoretical perspective that can stitch together a wide range of seemingly discon­ nected administrative phenomena. So long as we conceive of resource allocation as what school finance and business administration special­ ists worry about, the door has been closed on a potentially powerful means of understanding a wide range of administrative phenomena. The compartmentalization is all the more regrettable these days because during the past ten to fifteen years, significant progress has been made toward broadening the resource allocation perspective, par­ ticularly at microlevels of the schooling system. Indeed, it is at the microlevels of the system that there is real potential for a broadened re­ source allocation approach to open the door on productive new lines of
NOUN DISTRIBUTION IN NATURAL LANGUAGES

Previous research on word class distribution claimed that 37% of word tokens are nouns, suggesting that there might exist a certain regularity of noun proportion 15 among human languages. To explore this possibility, we examined the proportion of noun and four other word classes within British and American English, and across seven languages in terms of different word frequency band. Results indicated that the noun proportion is evidently about or larger than 37%, and meanwhile increases with word rarity. Among frequent words, nouns increase as minor word classes decrease, 20 whereas among rare words, the noun proportion remains a stable level.
Multiresolution colonic polyp detection in CT colonography using spherical wavelets

The description of lesion shapes with curvature-based features is a widespread approach in polyp detection methods. These methods are motivated by the need to compactly and accurately encode the different existing shape forms on the colon wall. However, the colon wall presents a number of small convex shape that resemble polyps which increases drastically the number of false positive (FP) detected. In this paper a method based on multiresolution shape processing using the spherical wavelet transform is proposed. The method aims to reduce the number of FPs detected while preserving true positives. Simulation results illustrating the effectiveness of the method are presented.
An Integrated Honeypot Framework for Proactive Detection, Characterization and Redirection of DDoS Attacks at ISP level

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can effect the steady functioning of any network, posing a severe security threat. Concentrated single source DDoS attacks consume huge resources like bandwidth in a very small duration and have direct impact at ISP level, thus making them easily detectable. In contrast, diluted low rate DDoS attacks lead to graceful degradation of network over a longer duration and hence are mostly undetectable. The outcome of above attacks is that legitimate users are denied service. Though an array of schemes have been proposed for the detection of the presence of DDoS attacks, characterizing of the flows as a normal flow or a malicious one, and mitigating the effects of the attacks once they have been detected, there is still a dearth of complete frameworks that encompass multiple stages in the process of defense against DDoS attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel honeypot framework that proactively detects the presence of attack, characterizes the TCP flows as attack or legitimate, and mitigates the influence of the attack by redirecting attack flows to honeypots. The detection has been achieved by an innovative entropy based scheme. Our detection mechanism adapts itself according to variation in attack loads in real time and calibrates the system to operate in one of the naive, normal or best defense modes. The in stream flows are characterized on the basis of entropy value and mode of operation in moving time window. During mitigation, attack flows are redirected to autonomic dynamic honeypots present in the same network as active FTP servers. A dynamic honeypot engine (DHE) in honeypot controller (HC) module has been modeled to generate judicious mixture of honeypot and active FTP servers from a pool of servers depending on real time network conditions at ISP level. Goodput, mean time between failure and average response time have been evaluated for naive, normal and best defense mode of operation. We validate the effectiveness of the approach with simulations carried out at different attack strengths in ns-2 on a Linux platform. We also report our experimental results for detection over KDD 99 dataset. Results show that our proposed framework gives a drastic improvement in terms of average response time and good put. It meets the challenges of most of the existing solutions to DDoS with its ability to proactively detect variable rate attack in real time with minimum false alarms and minimum collateral damage. The proposed scheme has the potential to maintain stable network functionality even in the presence of attacks. It can be fine tuned according to the dynamically changing network conditions at ISP level.
Interaction of antibacterial compounds with RND eﬄux pumps in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections are becoming increasingly difficult to treat due to intrinsic antibiotic resistance and the propensity of this pathogen to accumulate diverse resistance mechanisms. Hyperexpression of eﬄux pumps of the Resistance-Nodulation-Cell Division (RND)-type multidrug eﬄux pumps (e.g., MexAB-OprM), chromosomally encoded by mexAB-oprM, mexCD-oprJ, mexEF-oprN, and mexXY (-oprA) is often detected in clinical isolates and contributes to worrying multi-drug resistance phenotypes. Not all antibiotics are affected to the same extent by the aforementioned RND eﬄux pumps. The impact of eﬄux on antibiotic activity varies not only between different classes of antibiotics but also between members of the same family of antibiotics. Subtle differences in physicochemical features of compound-pump and compound-solvent interactions largely determine how compounds are affected by eﬄux activity. The combination of different high-resolution techniques helps to gain insight into the functioning of these molecular machineries. This review discusses substrate recognition patterns based on experimental evidence and computer simulations with a focus on MexB, the pump subunit of the main RND transporter in P. aeruginosa.
Adapting  $\text{B}^{+}$ -Tree for Emerging Nonvolatile Memory-Based Main Memory

Among the emerging nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies, some resistive memories, including phase change memory (PCM), spin-transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-RAM), and metal-oxide resistive RAM (ReRAM), have been considered as promising replacements of conventional dynamic RAM (DRAM) to build future main memory systems. Main memory databases can benefit from their nice features, such as their low leakage power and nonvolatility, the high density of PCM, the good read performance and low read energy consumption of STT-RAM, and the low cost of ReRAM's crossbar architecture. However, they also have some disadvantages, such as their long write latency, high write energy, and limited lifetime, which bring challenges to database algorithm design for NVM-based memory systems. In this paper, we focus on the design of the ubiquitous B+-tree, aiming to make it NVM-friendly. We present a basic cost model for NVM-based memory systems which distinguishes writes from reads, and propose detailed CPU cost and memory access models for search, insert, and delete operations on a B+-tree. Based on the proposed models, we analyze the CPU costs and memory behaviors of the existing NVM-friendly B+-tree schemes, and find that they suffer from three issues. To address these issues we propose three different schemes. Experimental results show that our schemes can efficiently improve the performance, reduce the memory energy consumption, and extend the lifetime for NVM-based memory systems.
Event-Related Potentials to Emotional and Neutral Stimuli in Alcoholism

Several studies have demonstrated that the emotional value of stimuli affects P300 amplitude. In the present study, the influence of alcohol-related stimuli in alcoholic patients was investigated. Subjects were 10 alcoholic inpatients (3 female) and 10 age- and sex-matched controls. Eight alcohol-related and 8 neutral words served as stimuli in a visual oddball paradigm. Acohol-related words were targets (48 stimuli, 33%) and neutral words were standard stimuli (96 stimuli, 66%). Results showed that P300 amplitude for targets did not differ significantly between the two groups. However, P300 latency for targets as well as reaction time were significantly shorter in male alcoholic patients. In contrast, P300 latency was increased in female alcoholic patients but reaction time did not differ. These results suggest that male alcoholics process information linked to alcohol cues more rapidly than neutral cues, probably because a specific semantic network is activated in these patients. The decreased reaction time confirms the impulsive behavior frequently found in male alcoholism, as it has been described in type II alcoholism. Besides, the results imply that information processing was delayed in female alcoholic patients. Therefore this study demonstrates a gender-dependent impact of alcohol-related stimuli on information processing.