Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Back to Static Analysis for Kernel-Level Rootkit Detection

Rootkit's main goal is to hide itself and other modules present in the malware. Their stealthy nature has made their detection further difficult, especially in the case of kernel-level rootkits. There have been many dynamic analysis techniques proposed for detecting kernel-level rootkits, while on the other hand, static analysis has not been popular. This is perhaps due to its poor performance in detecting malware in general, which could be attributed to the level of obfuscation employed in binaries which make static analysis difficult if not impossible. In this paper, we make two important observations, first there is usually little obfuscation used in legitimate kernel-level code, as opposed to the malicious kernel-level code. Second, one of the main approaches to penetrate the Windows operating system is through kernel-level drivers. Therefore, by focusing on detecting malicious kernel drivers employed by the rootkit, one could detect the rootkit while avoiding the issues with current detection technique. Given these two observation, we propose a simple static analysis technique with the aim of detecting malicious driver. We first study the current trends in the implementation of kernel-level rookits. Afterward, we proposed a set of features to quantify the malicious behavior in kernel drivers. These features are then evaluated through a set of experiments on 4420 malicious and legitimate drivers, obtaining an accuracy of 98.15% in distinguishing between these drivers.
Large scale, synchronous variability of marine fish populations driven by commercial exploitation

Significance Large-scale synchronous variation in the abundance of marine fish populations has generally been viewed as a response to coupled atmosphere–ocean forcing. The possibility that commercial exploitation could contribute significantly to these variations has been largely dismissed. We demonstrate, using data from 22 Atlantic cod stocks distributed across the North Atlantic, that fishing pressure can cause synchronous changes in stock abundance at spatial and temporal scales comparable to those attributed to climate forcing. We conclude that an understanding of the underlying causes of the large-scale, often synchronous variability of exploited marine fish populations and their underlying food chains will require greater acceptance of the potential importance of exploitation than has been evident to date. Synchronous variations in the abundance of geographically distinct marine fish populations are known to occur across spatial scales on the order of 1,000 km and greater. The prevailing assumption is that this large-scale coherent variability is a response to coupled atmosphere–ocean dynamics, commonly represented by climate indexes, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation. On the other hand, it has been suggested that exploitation might contribute to this coherent variability. This possibility has been generally ignored or dismissed on the grounds that exploitation is unlikely to operate synchronously at such large spatial scales. Our analysis of adult fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass of 22 North Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) stocks revealed that both the temporal and spatial scales in fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass were equivalent to those of the climate drivers. From these results, we conclude that greater consideration must be given to the potential of exploitation as a driving force behind broad, coherent variability of heavily exploited fish species.
Altered Heterochromatin Binding by a Hybrid Sterility Protein in Drosophila Sibling Species

Understanding Hybrid Sterility The onset of reproductive barriers, or hybrid sterility, is a means of reinforcing genetic incompatibilities between isolated populations, leading to speciation. A handful of genes that underlie hybrid sterility have been discovered, but their molecular mechanism is generally unclear. Bayes and Malik (p. 1538, published online 22 October) reveal that the hybrid sterility gene Odysseus-site Homeobox (OdsH), which encodes a satellite-DNA binding protein, shows differential DNA binding patterns between the species Drosophila mauritiana and D. simulans; OdsH derived from D. mauritiana localizes to the D. simulans Y chromosome, whereas OdsH derived from D. simulans does not. The incorrect expression, localization, and endurance of the OdsH protein appear to affect spermatogenesis in hybrid males, explaining the mechanism underlying hybrid sterility between these species. Thus, genetic incompatibilities between satellite-DNA and their binding proteins may represent a general basis for hybrid sterility in animals. A male sterility protein localizes to evolutionarily dynamic loci within heterochromatin and leads to their decondensation. Hybrid sterility of the heterogametic sex is one of the first postzygotic reproductive barriers to evolve during speciation, yet the molecular basis of hybrid sterility is poorly understood. We show that the hybrid male sterility gene Odysseus-site homeobox (OdsH) encodes a protein that localizes to evolutionarily dynamic loci within heterochromatin and leads to their decondensation. In Drosophila mauritiana × Drosophila simulans male hybrids, OdsH from D. mauritiana (OdsHmau) acts as a sterilizing factor by associating with the heterochromatic Y chromosome of D. simulans, whereas D. simulans OdsH (OdsHsim) does not. Characterization of sterile hybrid testes revealed that OdsH abundance and localization in the premeiotic phases of spermatogenesis differ between species. These results reveal that rapid heterochromatin evolution affects the onset of hybrid sterility.
Human Platelet-Derived Mitogens

Human platelet lysates contained potent mitogenic activities for MCF-7 human breast-cancer cells in serum-freedefined media. Because these activities were not replaced by known platelet mitogens. such as platelet-derived growth factor or transforming growth factor , we sought to identify the breast cancer cell mitogens by purification and N amino-acid sequencing. Acetic acid extracts of outdated human platelets were concentrated by ammonium sulfate precipitation and fractionated on Sephadex G-50 and Bio-Gel P-b columns in 0.5 mol/L acetic acid. Two major activities were resolved by molecular sieve methods and fractionated further by reverse-phase highperformance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Purifications (70.000 to 870.000-fold) were accomplished yielding mol
Substance misuse and psychiatric illness: prospective observational study using the general practice research database

Objectives: To quantify the relation between substance misuse and psychiatric illness in the UK general practice population in terms of (a) the relative risk of developing one condition given prior exposure to the other and (b) the proportion of cases of one condition attributable to exposure to the other. Design: Population based prospective observational study using the general practice research database (GPRD) between 1993 and 1998. The 230 GP practices represent 3.1% of the population. Setting: England and Wales. Participants: 1.4 million registered patients of whom 3969 had both substance misuse and psychiatric diagnoses between 1993 and 1998. Main outcome measures: Relative risk (RR) for subsequent psychiatric illness among participants exposed to substance misuse and RR for subsequent substance misuse among participants exposed to psychiatric illness. Population attributable risk (PAR) of psychiatric illness attributable to substance misuse and of substance misuse attributable to psychiatric illness. Results: The baseline prevalence of psychiatric illness over the study period was 15% and 0.3% for substance abuse. RR for psychiatric illness for substance misusers compared with non-substance misusers was 1.54 (95% CI 1.47 to 1.62). RR for substance misuse among psychiatric compared with non-psychiatric cases was 2.09 (95% CI 1.99 to 2.22). PAR for psychiatric illness attributable to substance misuse was 0.2%. PAR for substance misuse attributable to psychiatric illness was 14.2%. Discussion: Only a comparatively small proportion of psychiatric illness seems possibly attributable to substance use whereas a more substantial proportion of substance use seems possibly attributable to psychiatric illness. This study does not support the hypotheses that comorbidity between substance misuse and psychiatric illness is primarily the result of substance misuse or that increasing comorbidity is largely attributable to increasing substance misuse.
Categorical Perception of Speaker Identity

In natural speech communication an important role is played not only by linguistically defined categories, which determine one part of the phonetic structure of verbal utterances, but also by other aspects, such as the expression of emotion or the characteristics ofthe perceived individual speaker. We do not yet know very much about how the latter types of information are encoded in the acoustic speech signal. In the framework of a research project on non-linguistic categories of perceived natural utterances we have focused our interest on the acoustic parameters of speaker identity. To determine the relevant parameters (or combination of parameters) it seems obvious to work with naturally produced material. The consequence is a situation which is much more complex than in the case of synthetic speech, where single parameters can be controlled easily. To extract relevant parameters of speaker identity the experimental paradigm of categorical perception should be an interesting instrument. Our first experiments described below were undertaken in order to see whether there actually exists the possibility of categorical perception in the domain of speaker identification. It is our aim to apply this instrument to (more or less) complex test material the parameters of which are manipulated in a more sophisticated way.
Noninvasive Measurement of Myocardial Activity Concentrations and Perfusion Defect Sizes in Rats With a New Small-Animal Positron Emission Tomograph

Background—We explored the feasibility of measuring regional tracer activity concentrations and flow defects in myocardium of rats with a high spatial resolution small-animal PET system (microPET). Methods and Results—Myocardial images were obtained after intravenous 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (18FDG) in 11 normal rats (group 1) and assembled into polar maps. Regional 18F activity concentrations were measured in 9 regions of interest and compared with tissue activity concentrations measured by well counting. In another 9 rats (group 2), myocardial perfusion images were acquired with 13N-ammonia at baseline and during coronary occlusion. On the polar maps recorded during coronary occlusion, the size of perfusion defects was measured as the myocardium with <50% of maximum activity and expressed as percent total myocardium and was correlated with the area at risk defined by postmortem staining. The diagnostic quality of 18FDG and 13N-ammonia microPET images was good to excellent; the images were easily assembled into polar maps. In group 1, regional 18F concentrations by microPET and postmortem were correlated linearly (r =0.99;P <0.01 for average and r =0.97;P <0.01 for regional concentrations). In group 2, perfusion defect sizes by microPET and postmortem were correlated linearly (P <0.01;r =0.93). Conclusions—The findings indicate the feasibility of noninvasive studies of the myocardium in rats with a dedicated small-animal PET-imaging device.
La loi SRU incite-t-elle les maires à construire du logement social ?Les enseignements d’une analyse principal-agent

Cet article analyse les proprietes incitatives de la loi SRU, promulguee en France en decembre 2000, dont l’une des finalites est d’accroitre l’offre de logements sociaux dans les communes qui en sont relativement depourvues. Il apporte notamment des eclairages sur les raisons pour lesquelles les communes se sont tres inegalement conformees aux objectifs de la loi. Grâce a un modele principal-agent, nous montrons que l’effort realise par les elus locaux depend des arbitrages economiques et politiques qu’ils operent. Le modele theorique a egalement une portee normative puisqu’il permet de formuler plusieurs ameliorations susceptibles d’accroitre l’effet incitatif du dispositif.
Social Network Integration: Towards Constructing the Social Graph

In this work, we formulate the problem of social network integration. It takes multiple observed social networks as input and returns an integrated global social graph where each node corresponds to a real person. The key challenge for social network integration is to discover the correspondences or interlinks across different social networks. We engaged an in-depth analysis across three online social networks, AMiner, Linkedin, and Videolectures in order to address what reveals users' social identity, whether the social factors consistent across different social networks and how we can leverage these information to perform integration. We proposed a unified framework for the social network integration task. It crawls data from multiple social networks and further discovers accounts correspond to the same real person from the obtained networks. We use a probabilistic model to determine such correspondence, it incorporates features like the consistency of social status and social ties across different, as well as one-to-one mapping constraint and logical transitivity to jointly make the prediction. Empirical experiments verify the effectiveness of our method.
Extended Dynamic Transmission Power Control Algorithm in Wireless Body Sensor Network Systems

In the wireless body sensor network system (WB-SNS), saving energy in sensor nodes is a high priority. As an energy-saving method for sensor nodes, the transmission power control (TPC) algorithm has been developed. The TPC technique is a method of saving energy by adjusting the transmission power of the radio chip inside a sensor node. Numerous TPC algorithms exist, but in this paper, the dynamic TPC algorithm was analyzed intensively. The existing dynamic TPC algorithm utilizes a linear equation to find the optimal transmission power level (TPL). However, the existing dynamic TPC algorithm may operate well when the channel condition is good but it could estimate the TPL inaccurately due to the generation of an incorrect linear equation when the channel conditions are bad. Therefore, to solve the problem described above, this paper proposes an extended dynamic TPC algorithm that can estimate errors earlier based on slope values, which can be extracted at the time of generation of the linear equation, and estimate transmission power better by reutilizing the existing transmission power to create a more accurate equation. Through an experiment, this paper also proves that the extended dynamic TPC algorithm showed better performance compared to the existing dynamic TPC algorithm.
Dosimetry and risk estimates of radioiodine therapy for large, multinodular goiters.

UNLABELLED In patients with a large, multinodular goiter (> 100 g), radiation absorbed doses in the thyroid, surrounding tissues and remainder of the body were estimated after therapeutic administration of 131I(3.7 MBq or 100 microCi/g of thyroid tissue retained at 24 hr). METHODS Thermoluminescent dosimeter (TLD) measurements were performed on 23 patients (12 euthyroid and 1I hyperthyroid; thyroid weight 222 +/- 72 g; 2.1 +/- 0.9 GBq 131I) on the skin over the thyroid, over the submandibular gland and over the parotid gland. Thyroid radioactivity measurements were done daily in 6 euthyroid and 6 hyperthyroid patients (thyroid weight 204 +/- 69 g; 1.9 +/- 0.9 GBq 131I). An iodine biokinetic model and the MIRD methodology were used to estimate absorbed doses in organs. Cancer risks were calculated using ICRP Publication 60. RESULTS Cumulated absorbed doses on the skin (TLD measurements) were 4.2 +/- 1.4 Gy (thyroid), 1.2 +/- 0.6 Gy (submandibular) and 0.4 +/- 0.2 Gy (parotid). All these values were significantly correlated with the amount of radioiodine retained in the thyroid at 24 hr (euthyroid versus hyperthyroid not significant). Absorbed doses in the thyroid of 94 +/- 25 Gy for euthyroid and 93 +/- 17 Gy for hyperthyroid patients were calculated (thyroid radioactivity measurements). Extrathyroidal absorbed doses (means of 12 patients) were 0.88 Gy in the urinary bladder, 0.57 Gy in the small intestine, 0.38 Gy in the stomach, and ranged from 0.05 to 0.30 Gy in other organs (euthyroid versus hyperthyroid not significant). A 1.6% life-time risk of development of cancer outside the thyroid gland was calculated. When applied to people of 65 yr and older the estimated risk is approximately 0.5%. CONCLUSION These data may help in choosing the treatment regimen for individual patients with a large, multinodular goiter, who have to be treated for hyperthyroidism or compressive problems. In younger patients, surgery may be preferred. However, for elderly patients and patients with cardiopulmonary disease, the advantages of noninvasive radioiodine treatment will outweight the life-time risk of this mode of therapy.
Transglutaminases: multifunctional cross‐linking enzymes that stabilize tissues

Transglutaminases catalyze the posttranslational modification of proteins by transamidation of available glutamine residues. This action results primarily in the formation of ∊‐(γ‐glutamyl)lysine cross‐links but includes the incorporation of polyamines into suitable protein substrates as well. The covalent isopeptide crosslink is stable and resistant to proteolysis, thereby increasing the resistance of tissue to chemical, enzymatic, and mechanical disruption. The plasma transglutaminase, factor XIIIa, is formed at sites of blood coagulation and impedes blood loss by stabilizing the fibrin clot. The squamous epithelium constituting the protective callus layer of skin is formed by the action of keratinocyte transglutaminase (TGK) and epidermal transglutaminase (TGE). The tissue transglutaminase (TGC) is a cytoplasmic enzyme present in many cells including those in the blood vessel wall. TGC function is unknown, although it could function to stabilize intra‐ and extra‐cellular molecules in a wide variety of physiologic or pathologic processes. The amino acid sequences of factor XIII, TGC, and TGK establish them as a homologous gene family and also reveal a striking homology to the erythrocyte membrane protein, band 4.2. This review summarizes the current information on structures, functions, and evolution of the most prominent members of this gene family. —Greenberg, C. S. ; Birckbichler, P. J.; Rice, R. H. Transglutaminases: multifunctional cross‐linking enzymes that stabilize tissues. FASEB J. 5: 3071‐3077; 1991.
Exploring Spoken Term Detection with a Robust Multi-Language Phone Recognition System

Information processing and retrieval has become a major interest topic in the speech community, with various applications in spoken document retrieval from speech data, like broadcast news, telephone conversations and roundtable meetings to audio query. The ultimate goal of Spoken Term Detection (STD) technology is to allow open vocabulary search over large collections of speech content, to find all of the occurrences of a specified term in a given corpus. For underresourced languages, STD can only be addressed with Query-by-Example search where the queries are recordings of spoken words. This, coupled with growing web-accessible volumes of audio data, poses a difficult task consisting in finding repetitive patterns, while using as input only the speech signal. In this paper, we investigate whether the use of multilanguage resources as input features helps the process of term discovery for under-resourced languages, by phone recognition with a multilingual acoustic model of three languages (Albanian, English and Romanian). The novel Power Normalised Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC) features are used for improved robustness to noise, along with the well know Melfrequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features.
When is an example a counterexample?

In this extended abstract, we carefully examine a purported counterexample to a postulate of iterated belief revision. We suggest that the example is better seen as a failure to apply the theory of belief revision in sucient detail. The main contribution is conceptual aiming at the literature on the philosophical foundations of the AGM theory of belief revision [1]. Our discussion is centered around the observation that it is often unclear whether a specic example is a \genuine" counterexample to an abstract theory or a misapplication of that theory to a concrete case.
Population Genetic Study of the Red-Collared Brown Lemur (Eulemur collaris É. Geoffroy) in Southeastern Madagascar

The red-collared brown lemur, Eulemur collaris (E. Geoffroy), is relatively isolated geographically from other Eulemur species in southeastern Madagascar. Like many other lemur species, the red-collared brown lemur is particularly threatened due to habitat loss and human activities. To evaluate population structure and genetic diversity of this species, we utilized ten informative microsatellite loci derived from the Eulemur rubriventer (I. Geoffroy) genome. Significant genetic differentiation among populations was detected and that differentiation was found to be correlated to geographic isolation. Moreover, we found evidence to support recent weak to moderate reductions in effective population sizes in two of the perturbed populations.
Pesticides and child neurodevelopment

Purpose of review This review summarizes the recent research on pesticide exposure and child neurobehavioral development with a focus on in-utero exposure to organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides. Recent findings Recent studies on in-utero exposure to the organochlorine pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and its breakdown product, dichlorodiphenyldichloroethene, indicate that exposure is associated with poorer infant (6 months and older) and child neurodevelopment. Yet, the studies differ on the domain of development that is affected. Research on organophosphate pesticide exposure and neurodevelopment is limited but suggests some negative association of exposure and neurodevelopment at certain ages. Two reports agree that increased levels of organophosphate exposure in utero result in greater numbers of abnormal reflexes in neonates and studies in older infants and young children also point to a negative association with development. In young children (2–3 years) two separate studies observed an increase in maternally reported pervasive developmental disorder with increased levels of organophosphate exposure. Summary Given that the literature suggests a link between organochlorine and in-utero pesticide exposure and impaired child neurodevelopment, clinicians should educate parents about prevention of exposure, especially in populations living in agricultural areas or where household use is common.
Low-profile ultra-wideband directional dipole antenna as a feed for reflectors in radio telescopes

In this paper, a small top plate is found useful to improve the impedance bandwidth of an ultra-wideband dipole antenna horizontally above a ground plane. A linearly-polarized prototype based on this new and simple design methodology can operate over nearly 3.5:1 bandwidth with return losses better than 10 dB, and with nearly stable radiation patterns, high BOR1 efficiency and aperture efficiency over the entire operating band.