Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Key Management in IP-based Ubiquitous Sensor Networks : Issues , Challenges and Solutions

As wireless sensor networks continue to grow, so does the need for effective security mechanisms. Because sensor networks may interact with sensitive data and/or operate in hostile unattended environments, it is imperative that these security concerns be addressed from the beginning of the system design. However, due to inherent resource and computing constraints, security in sensor networks poses different challenges than traditional network/computer security. In this paper, we focus on the key management issues in IP-based ubiquitous sensor networks. 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low Power Personal Area Network) is analyzed for its vulnerability to security threats and suitable security mechanisms. Our analysis ascertains that the preassigned key-based security is prone to failures. Such networks need a dynamic key management mechanism to establish a secure communication. For the sake of analysis, we select one of the possible key management solutions in 6LoWPANs—the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). We deliberate on its efficacy by mapping it onto an application scenario. We compare ECC in 6LoWPANs against the classical implementation of PKI based ECC in sensor networks and put forth our
Socio-Cultural Practices and Restrictions of Entrepreneurship in Transition Russia

Russia has experienced a radical economical and political change since the end of the 1980s. As a transition economy, Russia needs to usher in the entrepreneurial activities to transform from the self-interest disparaged communism to the capitalism, which encourages profit-seeking. After two decades of transformation into market system, Russian small and medium enterprises have not only contributed significantly to overcoming the transitional depression and fast growth but also created enormous employment opportunity. This paper attempts to investigate real entrepreneurial practices and restrictions confronted during the economic transition in Russia. The comparative study based on data of relevant international surveys like Doing Business Index or Global Entrepreneurship Monitor between Russia and other transition countries or Russia and good-practice economies merits our understanding of how entrepreneurs adapt to the new environment in order to create competitive advantages.
High-Resolution Spectroscopy of Ultracool M Dwarfs

We present high-resolution echelle spectroscopy of 39 dwarfs with spectral types between M6.5 and L0.5. With one exception, those dwarfs were selected from the Two Micron All Sky Survey database using photometric criteria, (J-KS) ≥ 1.1 and KS ≤ 12.0, and therefore should provide a sample free of the kinematic biases that can affect proper-motion–selected samples. Two of the stars, 2MASSI J0253202+271333 and 2MASSW J0952219-192431, are double-lined spectroscopic binaries. We have used our observations to search for Li I 6708 Å absorption, characteristic of substellar mass; estimate the level of chromospheric activity through measurement of Hα emission fluxes; measure rotational velocities via line broadening; and determine radial velocities and Galactic space motions. Two dwarfs have strong lithium absorption, the previously known brown dwarf LP 944-20 and 2MASSI J0335020+234235, which we identify as a probable 0.06 M⊙ brown dwarf with an age of ∼1 Gyr. We have investigated the prospect of using the observed frequency of lithium absorption among ultracool M dwarfs (M7 to M9.5) as a probe of the initial mass function, comparing the observed frequency against predictions based on recent theoretical models of low-mass dwarfs and an assumed star formation history. Our results show that the conclusions drawn are vulnerable both to systematic differences between the available models and to incomplete local sampling of the most recent star formation events (ages less than 108 yr). The latter consideration stems from the mass-dependent rate of evolution of brown dwarfs. Even given those caveats, however, the available observations are difficult to reconcile with Salpeter-like power-law mass functions (α ≥ 2) for masses below 0.1 M⊙. A comparison between the rotational velocities and Hα fluxes shows no evidence for significant correlation. The mean activity level of the ultracool dwarfs lies almost a factor of 10 below that of early- and mid-type M dwarfs. The relative number of dwarfs with v sin i < 20 km s-1 with respect to greater than 20 km s-1 is independent of spectral type. Finally, velocity dispersions derived for our photometrically selected sample of ultracool dwarfs are significantly lower than those measured for nearby M dwarfs but show remarkable similarity to results for earlier type emission-line (dMe) dwarfs. The latter are generally assigned ages of less than ∼3 Gyr.
Trends in International Student Mobility

International student recruitment is becoming integral to the financial health of many higher education institutions worldwide, in addition to remaining an important means of attracting talent and expanding campus diversity.The purpose of this research report is to provide a thorough understanding of the trends and issues related to international student recruitment.We present this research in two primary sections. First, we provide an overview of international student mobility to four host countries – the U.S., the UK, Australia and Canada in the context of major policy reforms. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of international enrollment trends in the U.S. with emphasis on emerging recruitment practices and institutional examples supporting these trends.We conclude that the perception of improved employment prospects will strengthen among international students, and the stringent immigration policies of the UK are likely to divert some traffic to destinations such as the U.S., Australia and Canada. International students will continue to display diversified choices of destination and will gravitate toward enrolling in English language programs and studying at the Bachelor’s level. Comprehensive report available for download from WENR link.
UAV PHOTOGRAMMETRY FOR MAPPING AND 3D MODELING - CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES -

UAV platforms are nowadays a valuable source of data for inspection, surveillance, mapping and 3D modeling issues. New applications in the short- and close-range domain are introduced, being the UAVs a low-cost alternatives to the classical manned a erial photogrammetry. Rotary or fixed wing UAVs, capable of performing the photogrammetric data acquisition with amateur or SLR digital cameras, can fly in manual, semi-automated and autonomous modes. With a typical photogrammetric pipeline, 3D results like DSM/DTM, contour lines, textured 3D models, vector data, etc. can be produced, in a reasonable automated way. The paper reports the latest developments of UAV image processing methods for photogrammetric applications, mapping and 3D modeling issues. Automation is nowadays necessary and feasible at the image orientation, DSM generation and orthophoto production stages, while accurate feature extraction is still an interactive procedure. New perspectives are also addressed.
Untold Stories. A Canadian Disability History Reader

This collection focuses on Canadians with mental, physical, and cognitive disabilities, and discusses the ways in which they lived, worked, and influenced public policy in Canada. Organized by time period, the 23 chapters in this collection are authored by a diverse group of scholars who discuss the untold histories of Canadians with disabilities—Canadians who influenced science and technology, law, education, healthcare, and social justice. Selected chapters discuss disabilities among Indigenous women; the importance of community inclusion; the ubiquity of stairs in the Montreal metro; and the ethics of disability research. Untold Stories: A Canadian Disability History Reader offers an exceptional presentation of influential people with various disabilities who brought about social change and helped to make Canada more accessible.
Entity based source code summarization (EBSCS)

In the software evolution process a developer must analyze the source code in order to understand the entities in it. In general this analysis is done manually which takes lots of time and is a tedious task. The other option is to use automated source code summarization techniques. Existing techniques does not provide the required summary and most of them are complex. Source code summarization is the task of creating readable summaries that describe the functionality of software. Source code summarization is a critical component of documentation generation. In this paper we propose a novel summarization technique called EBSCS which is based on the entities like packages, classes, methods control statements and comments in the source code. In this technique description is generated for the entities and the comment lines are used to generate summary for the source code.
Risk, Human Error, and System Resilience: Fundamental Ideas

Objective: I review and critique basic ideas of both traditional error/risk analysis and the newer and contrasting paradigm of resilience engineering. Background: Analysis of human error has matured and been applied over the past 50 years by human factors engineers, whereas the resilience engineering paradigm is relatively new. Method: Fundamental ideas and examples of human factors applications of each approach are presented and contrasted. Results: Probabilistic risk analysis provides mathematical rigor in generalizing on past error events to identify system vulnerabilities, but prediction is problematical because (a) error definition is arbitrary, and thus it is difficult to infer valid probabilities of human error to input to quantitative models, and (b) future accident conditions are likely to be quite different from those of past accidents. The new resilience engineering paradigm, in contrast, is oriented toward organizational process and is concerned with anticipating, mitigating, and preparing for graceful recovery from future events. Conclusion: Resilience engineering complements traditional error analysis but has yet to provide useful quantification and operational methods. Application: A best safety strategy is to use both approaches.
Recognising what you like: Examining the relation between the mere-exposure effect and recognition

The perceptual fluency/attributional model of the mere-exposure effect proposed by R. F. Bornstein and P. D'Agostino (1992) predicts that when recognition of a previously presented stimulus is above chance, feelings of fluency associated with that stimulus are discounted and thus the amount of fluency (mis)attributed to liking is reduced. This correction process results in smaller mere-exposure effects for supraliminal stimuli than for “subliminal” stimuli because when recognition is below chance participants are unaware of the source of fluency and they do not engage in correction. We tested this prediction in three experiments by presenting photographs of faces (Experiments 1 and 2) and polygons (Experiment 3) at varying exposure frequencies for 40 ms and 400 ms durations. Contrary to the prediction of the model, a significant mere-exposure effect was only found when recognition performance was at its highest level. Furthermore, across the three experiments liking and recognition were positively correlated.
Assessment of the Regional Climate Model Version 3 over the Maritime Continent Using Different Cumulus Parameterization and Land Surface Schemes

AbstractThis paper describes an assessment of the Regional Climate Model, version 3 (RegCM3), coupled to two land surface schemes: the Biosphere–Atmosphere Transfer System, version 1e (BATS1e), and the Integrated Biosphere Simulator (IBIS). The model’s performance in simulating precipitation over the Maritime Continent was evaluated against the 3-hourly Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis 3B42 product. It is found that the model suffers from three major errors in reproducing the observed rainfall histogram: underestimation of the frequency of dry periods, overestimation of the frequency of low-intensity rainfall, and underestimation of the frequency of high-intensity rainfall. Additionally, the model does not accurately reproduce the observed timing of the diurnal rainfall peak, particularly over land. These four errors persisted regardless of the choice of lateral boundary conditions, convective parameterization scheme, or land surface scheme. The magnitude of.
Taxation and Labor Force Participation: The Case of Italy

Italy has the lowest labor force participation of women among European countries. Moreover, the participation rate of married women is positively correlated to their husbands' income. We show that a high tax schedule together with tax credits and transfers raise the burden of two-earner households, generating disincentives to work. We estimate a structural labor supply model for women, and use the estimated parameters to simulate the effects of alternative revenue-neutral tax systems. We find that joint taxation implies a drop in the participation rate. Conversely, working tax credit and gender-based taxation boost it, with the effects of the former concentrated on low educated women.
Detection and notification of dangerous obstacles and places for visually impaired persons using a smart cane

People with visual impairment often might knock up against dangerous obstacles while walking and they might fall down the stairs or fall down from train platforms onto train tracks, because they cannot visually get the situation and they sometimes cannot environmental information correctly via an existing white cane. Recently smart white canes which have sensors and provide visually impaired persons with obstacle information, have been developed. This paper proposes the method that can detect only dangerous obstacles and places correctly and can inform visually impaired persons of them effectively. By the experiment results its effectiveness has been clarified.
Evolution of massive stars at very low metallicity including rotation and binary interactions

We discuss recent models of the evolution of massive stars at very low metallicity, including the effects of rotation, magnetic fields and binarity. Very metal poor stars lose very little mass and angular momentum during their main sequence evolution, and rotation plays a dominant role in their evolution. In rapidly rotating massive stars, the rotationally induced mixing time scale can be even shorter than the nuclear time scale throughout the main sequence. The consequent quasi‐chemically homogeneous evolution greatly differs from the standard massive star evolution that leads to formation of red giants with strong chemical stratification. Interesting outcomes of such a new mode of evolution include the formation of rapidly rotating massive Wolf‐Rayet stars that emit large amounts of ionizing photons, the formation of long gamma‐ray bursts and hypernovae, and the production of large amounts of primary nitrogen. We show that binary interactions can further enhance the effects of rotation, as mass accretio.
PoliTa: A multitagger for Polish

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a crucial task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). POS tags may be assigned to tokens in text manually, by trained linguists, or using algorithmic approaches. Particularly, in the case of annotated text corpora, the quantity of textual data makes it unfeasible to rely on manual tagging and automated methods are used extensively. The quality of such methods is of critical importance, as even 1% tagger error rate results in introducing millions of errors in a corpus consisting of a billion tokens. In case of Polish several POS taggers have been proposed to date, but even the best of the taggers achieves an accuracy of ca. 93%, as measured on the one million subcorpus of the National Corpus of Polish (NCP). As the task of tagging is an example of classification, in this article we introduce a new POS tagger for Polish, which is based on the idea of combining several classifiers to produce higher quality tagging results than using any of the taggers individually.
ERK1/2 mediates glucose-regulated POMC gene expression in hypothalamic neurons.

Hypothalamic glucose-sensing neurons regulate the expression of genes encoding feeding-related neuropetides POMC, AgRP, and NPY - the key components governing metabolic homeostasis. AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is postulated to be the molecular mediator relaying glucose signals to regulate the expression of these neuropeptides. Whether other signaling mediator(s) plays a role is not clear. In this study, we investigated the role of ERK1/2 using primary hypothalamic neurons as the model system. The primary neurons were differentiated from hypothalamic progenitor cells. The differentiated neurons possessed the characteristic neuronal cell morphology and expressed neuronal post-mitotic markers as well as leptin-regulated orexigenic POMC and anorexigenic AgRP/NPY genes. Treatment of cells with glucose dose-dependently increased POMC and decreased AgRP/NPY expression with a concurrent suppression of AMPK phosphorylation. In addition, glucose treatment dose-dependently increased the ERK1/2 phosphorylation. Blockade of ERK1/2 activity with its specific inhibitor PD98059 partially (approximately 50%) abolished glucose-induced POMC expression, but had little effect on AgRP/NPY expression. Conversely, blockade of AMPK activity with its specific inhibitor produced a partial (approximately 50%) reversion of low-glucose-suppressed POMC expression, but almost completely blunted the low-glucose-induced AgRP/NPY expression. The results indicate that ERK1/2 mediated POMC but not AgRP/NPY expression. Confirming the in vitro findings, i.c. v. administration of PD98059 in rats similarly attenuated glucose-induced POMC expression in the hypothalamus, but again had little effect on AgRP/NPY expression. The results are indicative of a novel role of ERK1/2 in glucose-regulated POMC expression and offer new mechanistic insights into hypothalamic glucose sensing.
Constraint-based Planning Using the Process Specification Language

A full account of the semantics of constraint-based planning in the Cyc KBS is presented. The constraint representation is generic as it makes use of a process representation ontology, the Process Specification Language, which is being developed as a standard by NIST. We also describe a planning graph algorithm that makes use of these constraints. These techniques allow modern, efficient planning techniques to be embedded into a large-scale KBS architecture, thereby re-combining two technologies that have diverged in recent research programmes. The relation between plan and process representation is also explored.
Simplified check node processing in nonbinary LDPC decoders

This paper deals with low-complexity algorithms for the check node processing in nonbinary LDPC decoders. After a review of the state-of-the-art, we focus on an original solution to significantly reduce the order of complexity of the Extended Min-Sum decoder at the elementary check node level. The main originality of the so-called Bubble Check algorithm is the two-dimensional strategy for the check node processing, which leads to a reduction of the number of comparisons. The simulation results obtained for the Bubble Check show that this complexity reduction does not introduce any performance loss and that it is even possible to further reduce the number of comparisons. This motivated the search of a simplified architecture and led to the L-Bubble Check, which is the main contribution of the paper. The implementation of a forward/backward check node as a systolic architecture of L-Bubble elementary checks is also described. Finally, some FPGA synthesis results of a whole GF(64)-LDPC decoder implementation are presented.
Treg Inducing Adjuvants for Therapeutic Vaccination Against Chronic Inflammatory Diseases

Many existing therapies in autoimmune diseases are based on systemic suppression of inflammation and the observed side effects of these therapies illustrate the pressing need for more specific interventions. Regulatory T-cells (Treg) are pivotal controllers of (auto-aggressive) immune responses and inflammation, and decreased Treg numbers and/or functioning have been associated with autoimmune disease. Therefore, Treg became frequently studied targets for more specific immunotherapy. Especially antigen-specific targeting of Treg would enable local and tailor made interventions, while obviating the negative side effect of general immuno-suppression. Self-antigens that participate in inflammation, irrespective of the etiology of the different autoimmune diseases, are held to be candidate antigens for antigen-specific interventions. Rather than tolerance induction to disease inciting self-antigens, which are frequently unknown, general self-antigens expressed at sites of inflammation would allow targeting of disease independent, but inflammatory-site specific, regulatory mechanisms. Preferably, such self-antigens should be abundantly expressed and up-regulated at the inflammatory-site. In this perspective heat shock proteins (Hsp) have several characteristics that make them highly attractive targets for antigen-specific Treg inducing therapy. The development of an antigen-specific Treg inducing vaccine is a major novel goal in the field of immunotherapy in autoimmune diseases. However, progress is hampered not only by the lack of effective antigens, but also by the fact that other factors such as dose, route, and the presence or absence of an adjuvant, turned out to be critical unknowns, with respect to the effective induction of Treg. In addition, the use of a Treg inducing adjuvant might be required to achieve an effective regulatory response, in the case of ongoing inflammation. Future goals in clinical trials will be the optimization of natural Treg expansion (or the induction of adaptive Treg) without loss of their suppressive function or the concomitant induction of non-regulatory T-cells. Here, we will discuss the potential use of protein/peptide-based vaccines combined with Treg inducing adjuvants for the development of therapeutic vaccines against chronic inflammatory conditions.
A Re-Appraisal of the Early Andean Human Remains from Lauricocha in Peru

The discovery of human remains from the Lauricocha cave in the Central Andean highlands in the 1960’s provided the first direct evidence for human presence in the high altitude Andes. The skeletons found at this site were ascribed to the Early to Middle Holocene and represented the oldest known population of Western South America, and thus were used in several studies addressing the early population history of the continent. However, later excavations at Lauricocha led to doubts regarding the antiquity of the site. Here, we provide new dating, craniometric, and genetic evidence for this iconic site. We obtained new radiocarbon dates, generated complete mitochondrial genomes and nuclear SNP data from five individuals, and re-analyzed the human remains of Lauricocha to revise the initial morphological and craniometric analysis conducted in the 1960’s. We show that Lauricocha was indeed occupied in the Early to Middle Holocene but the temporal spread of dates we obtained from the human remains show that they do not qualify as a single contemporaneous population. However, the genetic results from five of the individuals fall within the spectrum of genetic diversity observed in pre-Columbian and modern Native Central American populations.