Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards the Security Evaluation of Biometric Authentication Systems

Despite the obvious advantages of biometric authentication systems over traditional security ones (based on tokens or passwords), they are vulnerable to attacks which may considerably decrease their security. In order to contribute in resolving such problematic, we propose a modality-independent evaluation methodology for the security evaluation of biometric systems. It is based on the use of a database of common threats and vulnerabilities of biometric systems, and the notion of risk factor. The proposed methodology produces a security index which characterizes the overall security level of biometric systems. We have applied it on two different biometric systems (one research laboratory implementation of keystroke dynamics and a commercial system for physical access control using fingerprints) for clarifying its benefits.
View-dependent precomputed light transport using nonlinear Gaussian function approximations

We propose a real-time method for rendering rigid objects with complex view-dependent effects under distant all-frequency lighting. Existing precomputed light transport approaches can render rich global illumination effects, but high-frequency view-dependent effects such as sharp highlights remain a challenge. We introduce a new representation of the light transport operator based on sums of Gaussians. The nonlinear parameters of our representation enable 1) arbitrary bandwidth because scale is encoded as a direct parameter, and 2) high-quality interpolation across view and mesh triangles because we interpolate the mean direction of the Gaussians, thereby preventing linear cross-fading artifacts. However, fitting the precomputed light transport data to this new representation requires solving a nonlinear regression problem that is more involved than traditional linear and nonlinear (truncation) approximation techniques. We present a new data fitting method based on optimization that includes energy terms aimed at enforcing artifact-free interpolation. We demonstrate that our method achieves high visual quality with a small storage cost and an efficient rendering algorithm.
Diet manipulation and prevention of aging, cancer and autoimmune disease

Purpose of reviewDietary supplementation and other dietary regimens have become increasingly popular in the US population. Information regarding how different dietary constituents interact when consumed simultaneously is needed. This review examines the recent literature on how different dietary constituents may interact physiologically when consumed in combination. Furthermore, the potential human relevance of calorie restriction and nonclassical function of vitamin E is discussed. Recent findingsLong-term calorie restriction in monkeys has shown similar beneficial effects as has been shown in rodents. Limited calorie restriction studies in humans have shown promise in reducing the incidence of heart disease and breast cancer. The combination of calorie restriction and ω-3 fatty acids may be a more potent antiinflammatory diet than either regimen alone. The type of fiber that is most protective against colon cancer may be dependent on the type of dietary fat consumed simultaneously. Vitamin E derivatives that possess no antioxidant activity may be potent inhibitors of cancer, but not normal, cell growth. SummaryDietary modification has shown its greatest beneficial effect when started prior to or immediately after the onset of disease. Also, understanding how the subtypes or isoforms of nutrients function is important since their physiological effects may be drastically different. It is important to understand the entire dietary profile of an individual when making dietary recommendations because one nutrient, or dietary ingredient, may enhance or cancel out the beneficial effects of another dietary ingredient.
WEST FRISIAN -wV-/-jV- BREAKING: A GENERATIVE APPROACH

Frisian would seem to provide the linguist with an ideal laboratory for applying a generative approach to historical and dialectological problems, particularly in the area of phonology. The comparativists of the past Century established (West) Germanic base forms from which we may derive the attested Old Frisian forms to c. 1400 and modern dialectologists, äs Hof (1933) and Fokkema and Spahr van der Hoek (1967), have collected raw systematic phonetic data from the modern dialects. While the transitional 15th/16th Century period is adequately represented in texts such äs the Oorkonden (1329-c. 1550) and the Snitser Recesboemk (1490-1517), the paucity of documents from Middle Frisian (1550-1800) is notorious: we are restricted to the rather limited corpora of Reyner Bogerman's Friesche Rijmspreuken, the posthumously published works o Gysbert Japicx (1603-1666) and a few minor texts, e.g. De Hindelooper zeemansalmanak (before 1679), see Feitsma (1956). Given adequate information about base forms and considerations of simplicity criteria in rule ordering, generative phonology would seem to provide a firm basis for theoretical reconstruction of an intermediary Middle Frisian between Classical (c. 1250-1400) and Transitional (1400-1550) Old Frisian on the one hand and Modern Frisian (1800-) on the other hand. As in all discussions of periodisation, however, temporal parameters are largely arbi-
Evolution of tRNA nucleotidyltransferases: A small deletion generated CC-adding enzymes

CCA-adding enzymes are specialized polymerases that add a specific sequence (C-C-A) to tRNA 3′ ends without requiring a nucleic acid template. In some organisms, CCA synthesis is accomplished by the collaboration of evolutionary closely related enzymes with partial activities (CC and A addition). These enzymes carry all known motifs of the catalytic core found in CCA-adding enzymes. Therefore, it is a mystery why these polymerases are restricted in their activity and do not synthesize a complete CCA terminus. Here, a region located outside of the conserved motifs was identified that is missing in CC-adding enzymes. When recombinantly introduced from a CCA-adding enzyme, the region restores full CCA-adding activity in the resulting chimera. Correspondingly, deleting the region in a CCA-adding enzyme abolishes the A-incorporating activity, also leading to CC addition. The presence of the deletion was used to predict the CC-adding activity of putative bacterial tRNA nucleotidyltransferases. Indeed, two such enzymes were experimentally identified as CC-adding enzymes, indicating that the existence of the deletion is a hallmark for this activity. Furthermore, phylogenetic analysis of identified and putative CC-adding enzymes indicates that this type of tRNA nucleotidyltransferases emerged several times during evolution. Obviously, these enzymes descend from CCA-adding enzymes, where the occurrence of the deletion led to the restricted activity of CC addition. A-adding enzymes, however, seem to represent a monophyletic group that might also be ancestral to CCA-adding enzymes. Yet, experimental data indicate that it is possible that A-adding activities also evolved from CCA-adding enzymes by the occurrence of individual point mutations.
Analysis of ongoing EEG elicited by natural music stimuli using nonnegative tensor factorization

This study proposes a six-step approach to analyze ongoing EEG elicited by 512-second long natural music (modern tango). The spectrogram of the ongoing EEG was first produced, and then a fourth-order tensor including the spectrograms of multiple channels of multiple participants was decomposed via nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF) into four factors, including temporal, spectral and spatial components, and multi-domain features of all participants. We found one extracted temporal component by NTF significantly (p <; 0.01) correlated with the temporal course of a long-term music feature, `fluctuation centroid' moreover, the power of posterior alpha activity was found to be associated with this temporal component. Hence, it looks promising to apply the proposed method for analyzing other ongoing EEG elicited by other natural stimuli.
Caveosomes and endocytosis of lipid rafts

Endocytosis of various endogenous plasma membrane molecules, including signalling receptors, glycosphingolipids and glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-linked proteins, occurs in the absence of functional clathrin-coated pits. Most of these molecules are found in biochemically defined lipid rafts, which suggests that at least some clathrin-independent endocytosis may be raft specific or raft mediated. However, recent studies of the uptake of raft markers have revealed a diversity of internalization methods. Although lipid rafts may somehow be recognized by endocytic machinery, at this stage the data do not readily fit with the idea of a single raft-specific or raft-dependent endocytic pathway. Many studies report uptake of raft molecules by caveolar endocytosis (defined by sensitivity to cholesterol depletion and to overexpression of a specific mutant of dynamin 2). It is now apparent that this is a highly regulated process, and caveolin 1, one of the characteristic protein components of caveolae, might in fact act to slow or inhibit endocytosis. The molecular details of caveolar endocytosis have yet to be elucidated. Several sources indicate that clathrin-independent uptake to a distinct class of caveolin-1-containing endosome, termed the caveosome, allows different types of endocytic mechanisms to have different functional consequences for the cell. It is likely that there are mechanisms that allow recruitment and targeting of specific molecules to caveosomes.
Applying Conceptual Conflict Strategies in the Learning of the Energy Concept

Abstract This paper reports on a study which deals with implications of instructional strategies through which it was attempted to creak cognitive disequilibrations in order to achieve conceptual change, while learning the energy concept. Different responses to disequilibration were observed, pointing out several difficulties in the application of such conceptual conflict strategies. This study is naturalistic and is intended to characterise problematic situations, not to assess their relative frequency.
Interleaved synchronous buck converter with high conversion ratio and voltage regulation

The paper presents a synchronous interleaved buck converter with high voltage conversion ratio and improved voltage regulation. The converter also possesses good characteristics like low switch voltage stress thus reduced switching losses. Capacitive voltage division gives enhanced input voltage division thus voltage across the switches is reduced. Here synchronous rectification is used which avoids the conduction losses caused by the freewheeling diodes. Here the load voltage is maintained from full load to no-load condition and also during line voltage change.
Real Continuation from the Complex quadratic Family: Fixed-Point bifurcation Sets

This paper is primarily a numerical study of the fixed-point bifurcation loci — saddle-node, period-doubling and Hopf bifurcations — present in the family: where z is a complex dynamic (phase) variable, its complex conjugate, and C and A are complex parameters. We treat the parameter C as a primary parameter and A as a secondary parameter, asking how the bifurcation loci projected to the C plane change as the auxiliary parameter A is varied. For A=0, the resulting two-real-parameter family is a familiar one-complex-parameter quadratic family, and the local fixed-point bifurcation locus is the main cardioid of the Mandlebrot set. For A ≠ 0, the resulting two-real-parameter families are not complex analytic, but are still analytic (quadratic) when viewed as a map of ℛ2. Saddle-node and period-doubling loci evolve from points on the main cardioid for A=0 into closed curves for A ≠ 0. As A is varied further from 0 in the complex plane, the three sets interact in a variety of interesting ways. More generally, we discuss bifurcations of families of maps with some parameters designated as primary and the rest as auxiliary. The auxiliary parameter space is then divided into equivalence classes with respect to a specified set of bifurcation loci. This equivalence is defined by the existence of a diffeomorphism of corresponding primary parameter spaces which preserves the specified set of specified bifurcation loci. In our study there is a huge amount of complexity added by specifying the three fixed-point bifurcation loci together, rather than one at a time. We also provide a preliminary classification of the types of codimension-one bifurcations one should expect in general studies of families of two-parameter families of maps of the plane. Comments on numerical continuation techniques are provided as well.
PCAP: Proportional Channel Access Probability Fairness in Multi-rate IEEE 802.11 DCF

The 802.11 standard supports multiple data transmitting rates. The "throughput fairness" characteristic of the standard DCF appears undesirable, because of the high rate nodes has same channel access probability with the low rate ones. COT-based fairness is proposed with the purpose of guaranteeing fairness and improving the aggregate throughput, but the COT fairness is achieved by adjusting stations' packet length and sending multiple back-to-back packets at one time, it not suitable for all applications. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of a PCAP(Proportional Channel Access Probability) fairness index. The index evaluate the fairness by the CAP which is in proportion to the nodes' transmission rates. This paper also proposed a PCAP-based fairness algorithm. With our algorithm, the stations in WLAN can achieve PCAP-based fairness which is independent with nodes' packet length. Through exclusive simulations, we show that the PCAP-based fairness index and algorithm leads to significant improvements in aggregate throughput and all stations have proportional fairness under multi-rate condition.
Algorithms for Molecular Biology

The String Barcoding (SBC) problem, introduced by Rash and Gusfield (RECOMB, 2002), consists in finding a minimum set of substrings that can be used to distinguish between all members of a set of given strings. In a computational biology context, the given strings represent a set of known viruses, while the substrings can be used as probes for an hybridization experiment via microarray. Eventually, one aims at the classification of new strings (unknown viruses) through the result of the hybridization experiment. In this paper we show that SBC is as hard to approximate as Set Cover. Furthermore, we show that the constrained version of SBC (with probes of bounded length) is also hard to approximate. These negative results are tight.
Randomised controlled trial of azithromycin in smokers with asthma

To the Editor: Smokers with asthma have poor symptom control, accelerated decline in lung function and an attenuated response to corticosteroids compared to nonsmokers with asthma [1]. There is an unmet need for alternative or additional drugs for smokers with asthma who are unable to stop smoking [2]. Macrolide antibiotics have anti-inflammatory activity [3] and in clinical studies there is good evidence for efficacy in the treatment of diffuse pan-bronchiolitis and cystic fibrosis, as well as in preventing chronic rejection after lung transplantation [4, 5]. In asthma, chronic treatment is associated with a reduction in bronchial hyperreactivity in mild-to-moderate asthma [6] and in exacerbation rates in non-eosinophilic severe asthma [7]. To date, no studies have examined the efficacy of macrolide antibiotics exclusively in current smokers with asthma. A randomised double-blind parallel-group trial compared azithromycin, 250 mg per day, with placebo for 12 weeks. All subjects were aged 18–70 years, were current smokers (≥5 pack-years history) with chronic asthma (>1 year duration; defined by international criteria [8]) and had to be free of exacerbation and respiratory tract infection for a minimum 6-week period prior to randomisation. A baseline visit was performed following a 4-week run-in period on inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) therapy equivalent to 400 μg beclometasone ± a long-acting β2-agonist (LABA). Ethical approval was obtained and all subjects provided written informed consent. Study visits were performed at 4, 8 and 12 weeks. Clinic visit peak expiratory flow (PEF) after 12 weeks treatment was the primary outcome measure. A sample size of 68 …
Structure-specific statistical mapping of white matter tracts

This paper describes a new statistical analysis framework for diffusion-based white matter studies. The framework is based on a recent unbiased normalization algorithm for diffusion tensor images. Taking advantage of the fact that most human white matter tracts are thin sheet-like structures, this framework uses deformable medial models to represent six of the major tracts in a white matter atlas derived for a given set of images. The medial representation allows one to average tensor-based features along directions perpendicular to the tracts, thus reducing data dimensionality and accounting for errors in normalization. Unlike earlier work in the area of tract-based spatial statistics (Smith et al, 2006), this framework enables the analysis of individual white matter structures, and provides a range of possibilities for computing statistics and visualizing differences between cohorts. The framework is demonstrated in a study of white matter differences in pediatric chromosome 22q deletion syndrome.
Comparing Software Architecture Recovery Techniques Using Accurate Dependencies

Many techniques have been proposed to automatically recover software architectures from software implementations. A thorough comparison among the recovery techniques is needed to understand their effectiveness and applicability. This study improves on previous studies in two ways. First, we study the impact of leveraging more accurate symbol dependencies on the accuracy of architecture recovery techniques. Previous studies have not seriously considered how the quality of the input might affect the quality of the output for architecture recovery techniques. Second, we study a system (Chromium) that is substantially larger (9.7 million lines of code) than those included in previous studies. Obtaining the ground-truth architecture of Chromium involved two years of collaboration with its developers. As part of this work we developed a new sub module-based technique to recover preliminary versions of ground-truth architectures. The other systems that we study have been examined previously. In some cases, we have updated the ground-truth architectures to newer versions, and in other cases we have corrected newly discovered inconsistencies. Our evaluation of nine variants of six state-of-the-art architecture recovery techniques shows that symbol dependencies generally produce architectures with higher accuracies than include dependencies. Despite this improvement, the overall accuracy is low for all recovery techniques. The results suggest that (1) in addition to architecture recovery techniques, the accuracy of dependencies used as their inputs is another factor to consider for high recovery accuracy, and (2) more accurate recovery techniques are needed. Our results show that some of the studied architecture recovery techniques scale to the 10M lines-of-code range (the size of Chromium), whereas others do not.
A hindi version of the MMSE: The development of a cognitive screening instrument for a largely illiterate rural elderly population in india

The Indo‐US Cross‐National Dementia Epidemiology Study seeks to compare two rural populations, in the US and India: the Monongahela Valley, a rural community of relatively low socioeconomic status in southwestern Pennsylvania (USA), and Ballabgarh, a rural community near New Delhi in North India. Of Particular interest is the fact that the Ballabgarh elderly population is exclusively Hindi‐speaking, has little or no education and is largely illiterate, rendering its cognitive screening a particular challenge. In this article we report methods and preliminary data on the development of a Hindi cognitive screening instrument suitable for the Ballabgarh elderly population. We use as an example our Hindi adaptation of the Mini‐Mental State Examination (MMSE), a widely used global cognitive screening scale. Systematic, item‐by‐item, empirically based test development has shown that effective modifications can be made to existing tests that require reading and writing; and that culturally sensitive modifications can be made to render the test meaningful and relevant while still tapping the appropriate cognitive domains. Certain cognitive functions, particularly orientation to time, remain difficult to test adequately in this type of population. In Ballabgarh, as in the Monongahela Valley, educated individuals obtain higher test scores. Implications for dementia screening are discussed, including those relevant to the hypothesis that low education predisposes to dementia.
Regulation of ENA1 Na+-ATPase Gene Expression by the Ppz1 Protein Phosphatase Is Mediated by the Calcineurin Pathway

ABSTRACT Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains lacking the Ppz1 protein phosphatase are salt tolerant and display increased expression of the ENA1 Na+-ATPase gene, a major determinant for sodium extrusion, while cells devoid of the similar Ppz2 protein do not show these phenotypes. However, a ppz1 ppz2 mutant displays higher levels of ENA1 expression than the ppz1 strain. We show here that the increased activity of the ENA1 promoter in a ppz1 ppz2 mutant maps to two regions: one region located at −751 to −667, containing a calcineurin-dependent response element (CDRE), and one downstream region (−573 to −490) whose activity responds to intracellular alkalinization. In contrast, the increased ENA1 expression in a ppz1 mutant is mediated solely by an intact calcineurin/Crz1 signaling pathway, on the basis that (i) this effect maps to a single region that contains the CDRE and (ii) it is blocked by the calcineurin inhibitor FK506, as well as by deletion of the CNB1 or CRZ1 gene. The calcineurin dependence of the increased ENA1 expression of a ppz1 mutant would suggest that Ppz1 could negatively regulate calcineurin activity. In agreement with this notion, a ppz1 strain is calcium sensitive, and this mutation does not result in a decrease in the calcium hypertolerance of a cnb1 mutant. It has been shown that ENA1 can be induced by alkalinization of the medium and that a ppz1 ppz2 strain has a higher intracellular pH. However, we present several lines of evidence that show that the gene expression profile of a ppz1 mutant does not involve an alkalinization effect. In conclusion, we have identified a novel role for calcineurin, but not alkalinization, in the control of ENA1 expression in ppz1 mutants.