Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Overview of End-to-End Verifiable Voting Systems

Advances in E2E verifiable voting have the potential to fundamentally restore trust in elections and democratic processes in society. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive introduction to the field. We trace the evolution of privacy and verifiability properties in the research literature and describe the operations of current state-of-the-art E2E voting systems. We also discuss outstanding challenges to the deployment of E2E voting systems, including technical, legal, and usability constraints. Our intention, in writing this chapter, has been to make the innovations in this domain accessible to a wider audience. We have therefore eschewed description of complex cryptographic mechanisms and instead attempt to communicate the fundamental intuition behind the design of E2E voting systems. We hope our work serves as a useful resource and assists in the future development of E2E voting.
Membrane distribution and adsorptive endocytosis by C3b receptors on human polymorphonuclear leukocytes

C3b receptors on human polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) were nonrandomly distributed in small clusters on the plasma membranes of these cells when assessed by indirect immunofluorescence at 0 degree C using monospecific rabbit Fab' or F(ab')2 anti-C3b receptor and tetramethylrhodamine isothiocyanate (TRITC)-conjugated goat IgG anti- F(ab')2. When PMN were incubated with the bivalent anti-C3b receptor at 37 rather than at 0 degree C, almost no immunofluorescence was observed, which indicates that the C3b receptor-F(ab')2 complexes had been rendered inaccessible to TRITC-IgG anti-F(ab')2. Endocytosis of the anti-C3b receptor ligand was quantitated by measuring the binding 131I-IgG anti-F(ab')2 by PMN that had previously taken up 125I-F(ab')2 anti-C3b receptor at 0 and at 37 degree C, respectively. There was a constant 2: 1 molar ratio of anti-F(ab')2 to anti-C3b receptor with PMN that had been incubated with the first antibody at 0 degree C. In contrast, when increments of F(ab')2 anti-C3b receptor were taken up by the cells at 37 degree C, there was a dose-related decline in this molar ratio to a minimum of 0.2 molecules of anti-F(ab')2 anti-F(ab')2 bound per molecule of PMN-associated anti-C3b receptor. 125I-F(ab')2 anti-C3b receptor taken up by PMN at 37 degree C was also inaccessible to release by proteolytic treatment of the cells with pronase. The rate of endocytosis of 125I-F(ab')2 anti-C3b receptor was rapid as the PMN- bound antibody fragment became inaccessible to 131I-IgG anti-F(ab')2 within 10 min during incubation of the cells at 37 degree C. In contrast to these findings, 125I-Fab' anti-C3b receptor that was taken up by PMN at 37 degree C remained accessible to both 131I-IgG anti- F(ab')2 and to proteolytic release by pronase, which suggests that monovalent interaction of ligand with C3b receptors was not sufficient for induction of endocytosis. The requirement for multivalency was also demonstrated using the C3b-OR, the normal ligand for the C3b receptor. 125I-C3b-OR was specifically bound by PMN but remained on the cell receptor. 125I-C3b-OR was specifically bound by PMN but remained on the cell surface, as determined by its accessibility to pronase, unless it was cross-linked with F(ab')2 anti-C3. Although C3b receptors on PMN do not mediate internalization of adsorptive pinocytosis of soluble ligand indicates their potential for the clearance of C3b-bearing immune complexes without recruitment of other cell surface receptors.
Dietary Pattern and Risk of Multiple Myeloma in Two Large Prospective US Cohort Studies

Abstract Background The limited data on specific dietary components and risk of multiple myeloma (MM) show no consistent association. Studies have not examined the association of dietary pattern with MM risk. Methods In prospective cohorts of 69 751 women (Nurses’ Health Study, 1984–2014) and 47 232 men (Health Professionals Follow-up Study, 1986–2014), we examined the association between dietary pattern and risk of MM using Cox proportional hazard models. Diet was assessed repeatedly every 4 years with food frequency questionnaires and was used to calculate dietary patterns including the Alternate Healthy Eating Index-2010, Alternate Mediterranean Diet, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, Prudent and Western patterns, the empirical dietary inflammatory pattern (EDIP), and empirical dietary indices for insulin resistance (EDIR) and hyperinsulinemia (EDIH). Results During 2 792 257 person-years of follow-up, we identified 478 incident MM cases (215 women, 263 men). In men, high EDIP was statistically significantly associated with a 16% increase in MM risk (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.16, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.02 to 1.32 per 1-SD increase). Moreover, EDIR and EDIH had a suggestive positive association (EDIR: HR = 1.09, 95% CI = 0.96 to 1.24; and EDIH: HR = 1.11, 95% CI = 0.97 to 1.28 per 1-SD increase). We observed no other associations with MM risk in men and no associations for any dietary pattern with MM risk in women. Conclusions We present the first evidence for a role of diets with higher inflammatory or insulinemic potential in MM development. Further studies are warranted to explore these associations in other populations, including the apparent restriction to men.
On the Early-Time X-Ray Spectra of Swift Afterglows. I. Evidence for Anomalous Soft X-Ray Emission

We have conducted a thorough and blind search for emission lines in >70 Swift X-ray afterglows of total exposure ~107 s. We find that most afterglows are consistent with pure power laws plus extinction. Significant outliers to the population exist at the 5%-10% level and have anomalously soft, possibly thermal spectra. Four bursts are singled out via possible detections of two to five lines: GRB 060218, GRB 060202, GRB 050822, and GRB 050714B. Alternatively, a blackbody model with kT ~ 0.1-0.5 keV can describe the soft emission in each afterglow. The most significant soft-component detections in the full data set of ~2000 spectra correspond to GRB 060218/SN 2006aj, with line significances ranging up to ~20 σ. A thermal plasma model fit to the data indicates that the flux is primarily due to L-shell transitions of Fe at roughly solar abundance. We associate (>4 σ significant) line triggers in the three other events with K-shell transitions in light metals. We favor a model where the possible line emission in these afterglows arises from the mildly relativistic cocoon of matter surrounding the GRB jet as it penetrates and exits the surface of the progenitor star. The emitting material in each burst is at a similar distance ~1012-1013 cm, a similar density ~1017 cm-3, and subject to a similar flux of ionizing radiation. The lines may correlate with the X-ray flaring. For the blackbody interpretation, the soft flux may arise from breakout of the GRB shock or plasma cocoon from the progenitor stellar wind, as recently suggested for GRB 060218 (Campana et al. 2006). Due to the low z of GRB 060218, bursts faint in gamma rays with fluxes dominated by this soft X-ray component could outnumber classical GRBs 100 to 1.
Dynamic and Distributed Indexing Architecture in Search Engine using Grid Computing

Search engines require computers with high computation resources for processing to crawl web pages and huge data storage to store billions of pages collected from the World Wide Web after parsing and indexing these pages. The indexer is one of the main components of the search engine that come intermediate between the crawler and the searcher. Indexing is the process of organizing the collected data to facility information retrieval and minimizes the time of query. Indexing requires huge processing and storage resources, and the indexing has a high effect on the performance of the search engine, this effect differs based on the structure and the process index construction. Distribution of the indexing process over a cluster of computers in grid computing will improve the performance through distributing the parsing load over a number of computers in a grid environment, and distributing the indexed data over distributed memory according to terms over a number of computers remotely. Due to the search engine data collections with frequent changes, the indexer require dynamic indexing. So the merge of the distributed and dynamic indexing in architecture over grid computing will give a better performance utilizing the available resources without need to computers with high cost such as supercomputers. General Terms Grid Computing, Algorithms, Inverted Index, and World Wide Web.
GMM-based Classifiers for the Automatic Detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea

The aim of automatic pathological voice detection systems is to serve as tools, to medical specialists, for a more objective, less invasive and improved diagnosis of diseases. In this respect, the gold standard for those system include the usage of a optimized representation of the spectral envelope, either based on cepstral coefﬁcients from the mel-scaled Fourier spectral envelope (Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefﬁcients) or from an all-pole estimation (Linear Prediction Coding Cepstral Coefﬁcients) forcharacterization, and Gaussian Mixture Models for posterior classiﬁcation. However, the study of recently proposed GMM-based classiﬁers as well as Nuisance mitigation techniques, such as those employed in speaker recognition, has not been widely considered inpathology detection labours. The present work aims at testing whether or not the employment of such speaker recognition tools might contribute to improve system performance in pathology detection systems, speciﬁcally in the automatic detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea. The testing procedure employs an Obstructive Sleep Apnea database, in conjunction with GMM-based classiﬁers looking for a better performance. The results show that an improved performance might be obtained by using such approach.
The effects of musical tempo and non-invasive neuromodulation on autonomic control of the heart

Music is viewed as conferring health benefits, with tempo being the most influential parameter for altering human physiology and psychology. However, this work has used stimuli that manipulate multiple musical parameters at a time. Therefore, this thesis investigated the effects of musical tempo manipulations on cardiovascular autonomic function and subjective responses. Tempo manipulations comprised of stepped (sudden) increases and decreases in the speed of a simple beat pattern and heart rate variability estimated autonomic balance. Shifts towards parasympathetic predominance occurred for the stepped decrease in tempo stimulus but not for the stepped increase in tempo. When using more musically sophisticated stimuli, greatest vagal tone occurred for the slowest tempo (60bpm) of the stepped decrease in tempo stimulus. Autonomic function did not differ between an experimental (melody and rhythm) and control group (rhythm only). However, the latter experienced greater subjective arousal than the former. Growing interest in wearable technologies led to the testing of a wearable device that combined relaxation music with transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation (tVNS). tVNS is a non-invasive neuromodulatory technique that administers small electrical impulses to the outer ear to stimulate the auricular vagus nerve. Both stimuli individually promote shifts towards parasympathetic predominance. It was anticipated that music combined with tVNS would elicit the greatest shifts towards parasympathetic predominance. However, the sham was equally as effective as music only, tVNS only, and their combination at altering autonomic activity. Autonomic responses to all stimuli employed in the thesis were predicted by baseline LF%. These findings suggest that music and wearables may be susceptible to placebo effects.
Does a More Precise Chemical Description of Protein–Ligand Complexes Lead to More Accurate Prediction of Binding Affinity?

Predicting the binding affinities of large sets of diverse molecules against a range of macromolecular targets is an extremely challenging task. The scoring functions that attempt such computational prediction are essential for exploiting and analyzing the outputs of docking, which is in turn an important tool in problems such as structure-based drug design. Classical scoring functions assume a predetermined theory-inspired functional form for the relationship between the variables that describe an experimentally determined or modeled structure of a protein–ligand complex and its binding affinity. The inherent problem of this approach is in the difficulty of explicitly modeling the various contributions of intermolecular interactions to binding affinity. New scoring functions based on machine-learning regression models, which are able to exploit effectively much larger amounts of experimental data and circumvent the need for a predetermined functional form, have already been shown to outperform a broad range of state-of-the-art scoring functions in a widely used benchmark. Here, we investigate the impact of the chemical description of the complex on the predictive power of the resulting scoring function using a systematic battery of numerical experiments. The latter resulted in the most accurate scoring function to date on the benchmark. Strikingly, we also found that a more precise chemical description of the protein–ligand complex does not generally lead to a more accurate prediction of binding affinity. We discuss four factors that may contribute to this result: modeling assumptions, codependence of representation and regression, data restricted to the bound state, and conformational heterogeneity in data.
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes Factor Structure of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale in Japanese Psychiatric Outpatient and Student Populations

Background: The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) is a common screening instrument excluding somatic symptoms of depression and anxiety, but previous studies have reported inconsistencies of its factor structure. The construct validity of the Japanese version of the HADS has yet to be reported. To examine the factor structure of the HADS in a Japanese population is needed.
Optimized Modulation Modes for Adaptive OFDM systems

We propose the reduced modulation modes for bit and power allocation algorithms, which are used in multi-carrier transmissions. When the rectangular QAMs are available at a transmitter, they can be restricted to the square QAMs without any performance degradation so that the computational load and the hardware complexity can be reduced. To show that this restriction is possible, the power allocation property is first identified, and it is proved that the optimal allocation with the square QAMs has exactly the same performance as that with the rectangular QAMs. To verify the results, we include both the theoretical presentations and the numerical results.
Lean From Thy Neighbor: Stochastic & Adversarial Bandits in a Network

An individual's decisions are often guided by those of his or her peers, i.e., neighbors in a social network. Presumably, being privy to the experiences of others aids in learning and decision making, but how much advantage does an individual gain by observing her neighbors? Such problems make appearances in sociology and economics and, in this paper, we present a novel model to capture such decision-making processes and appeal to the classical multi-armed bandit framework to analyze it. Each individual, in addition to her own actions, can observe the actions and rewards obtained by her neighbors, and can use all of this information in order to minimize her own regret. We provide algorithms for this setting, both for stochastic and adversarial bandits, and show that their regret smoothly interpolates between the regret in the classical bandit setting and that of the full-information setting as a function of the neighbors' exploration. In the stochastic setting the additional information must simply be incorporated into the usual estimation of the rewards, while in the adversarial setting this is attained by constructing a new unbiased estimator for the rewards and appropriately bounding the amount of additional information provided by the neighbors. These algorithms are optimal up to log factors; despite the fact that the agents act independently and selfishly, this implies that it is an approximate Nash equilibria for all agents to use our algorithms. Further, we show via empirical simulations that our algorithms, often significantly, outperform existing algorithms that one could apply to this setting.
MPI-IO : A Standard , Portable API for High-Performance Parallel I / O

MPI-IO, the I/O part of the MPI-2 standard, is a portable API for high-performance parallel I/O. It is speci cally designed to overcome the performance and portability limitations of the Unix-like APIs currently supported by most parallel le systems. We discuss the main features of MPI-IO and describe our MPI-IO implementation, ROMIO, which runs on most machines and le systems, including Linux clusters. We also explain how MPI-IO must be used in order to achieve high I/O performance.
A Refined DEM Study of Grain Size Reduction in Uniaxial Compression

The elementary behaviour of granular materials strongly depends on microstructural and geometrical changes from grain crushing. This paper proposes a 2D discrete element numerical model for the investigation of brittle granular crushing in confined uniaxial compression conditions. While our analysis adopts the well established strategy of replacing pre-crushed particles by post-fractured fragments, our model is based on a refined fracture criterion that accounts for: (1) the Weibull statistics of the tensile strengths, (2) the effects of the coordination number and (3) the curvature of the loading particles. Further refinements enable the current model to conserve mass and to extend the contrast between the fragment sizes as they evolve. Given these technical achievements, the scientific purpose of the paper is to test the prevailing assumption that confined uniaxial compression of granular material is leaded towards an ultimate fractal grain size distribution (gsd): in particular, we question whether the system tends towards a power-law gradation and self-similar topology.
The Response of Precipitation Minus Evapotranspiration to Climate Warming: Why the “Wet-Get-Wetter, Dry-Get-Drier” Scaling Does Not Hold over Land

Simulations with climate models show a land–ocean contrast in the response of P 2 E (precipitation minus evaporation or evapotranspiration) to global warming, with larger changes over ocean than over land. The changesoveroceanbroadlyfollowasimplethermodynamicscalingoftheatmosphericmoistureconvergence: the so-called ‘‘wet-get-wetter, dry-get-drier’’ mechanism. Over land, however, the simple scaling fails to give any regions with decreases in P 2 E, and it overestimates increases in P 2 E compared to the simulations. Changes in circulation cause deviations from the simple scaling, but they are not sufficient to explain this systematic moist bias. It is shown here that horizontal gradients of changes in temperature and fractional changes in relative humidity, not accounted for in the simple scaling, are important over land and highlatitudeoceans. An extended scaling that incorporates these gradientsis shown to better capturethe response of P 2 E over land, including a smaller increase in global-mean runoff and several regions with decreases in P2E. In the zonal mean overland, the gradienttermslead to a robust drying tendencyat almost all latitudes. This drying tendency is shown to relate, in part, to the polar amplification of warming in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the amplified warming over continental interiors and on the eastern side of midlatitude continents.
Evaluation, Orientation, and Action in Interactive StoryTelling

Interactive storytelling encompasses a wide variety of applications and systems that aim to allow players in a virtual world to affect the narrative progression prescribed by the author. The story world is often modeled by a set of hand-crafted causal and temporal relationships that define the possible narrative sequences based on the user's actions. In our view, a more promising approach involves applying methods from statistical language processing to create data-driven stories. Here, we explore integrating a typology of narrative clauses from Labov & Waletzky's theory of oral narrative(henceforth L&W) into the Say Anything data-driven storytelling approach. We show that we can automatically distinguish evaluation clauses from orientation and action clauses with 89% accuracy in fables, suggesting that it will be possible to develop new types of data-driven stories using L&W's typology.
NOACs versus warfarin for stroke prevention in patients with AF: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background Warfarin has been the anticoagulant of choice for the prevention of ischaemic stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). Novel oral anticoagulants (NOACs) are increasingly used as an alternative. Objectives The objective of this review was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the NOACs versus warfarin in patients with AF. Search methods Medline, EMBASE and grey literature search for all phase II and III randomised control trials. Data collection/analysis Two authors independently reviewed abstracts and performed data extraction of eligible full-text articles. Revman V.5 was used for meta-analysis. Main results 12 studies were identified with a total study population of 77 011. NOACs demonstrated a reduction in the composite of stroke or systemic embolic events OR 0.85 (95% CI 0.75 to 0.98), a 52% reduction in intracranial haemorrhage OR 0.48 (95% CI 0.40 to 0.57) and a 14% reduction in mortality OR 0.86 (0.82 to 0.91). The 30-day end of study switch to warfarin demonstrated an in increase in stroke or systemic embolic events OR 2.60 (95% CI 1.61 to 4.18) and an increase in major bleeding OR 2.19 (95% CI 1.42 to 3.36). Conclusions NOACs are superior to warfarin for the prevention of the composite of stroke and systemic embolism in patients with AF and an additional risk factor for stroke. There is a significant reduction in intracranial haemorrhage, which drives the finding of significantly lower mortality. During the poststudy switch from NOACs to warfarin there is an excess of the composite of stroke and systemic embolism as well as major bleeding events, which may be of significance in clinical practice.