Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving security decision under uncertainty: A multidisciplinary approach

Security decision-making is a critical task in tackling security threats affecting a system or process. It often involves selecting a suitable resolution action to tackle an identified security risk. To support this selection process, decision-makers should be able to evaluate and compare available decision options. This article introduces a modelling language that can be used to represent the effects of resolution actions on the stakeholders' goals, the crime process, and the attacker. In order to reach this aim, we develop a multidisciplinary framework that combines existing knowledge from the fields of software engineering, crime science, risk assessment, and quantitative decision analysis. The framework is illustrated through an application to a case of identity theft.
Effects of self‐esteem and gender on goal choice

Summary The relationship between enduring or personality characteristics and goal choice has been of considerable theoretical, but little empirical interest in recent years. From an expectancy value perspective, we addressed the impact of self-esteem and gender on choice of goal difficulty level. As predicted, esteem and gender made significant contributions to the prediction of goal choice. The implications of these findings for future research in organizational settings, goal setting theory, and the relationship between goals and tasks are discussed.
KPIs for facility's performance assessment, Part I: identification and categorization of core indicators

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the previously established list of key performance indicators (KPIs), to identify and categorize the core performance indicators that are measurable and quantifiable. Design/methodology/approach – A literature-based qualitative approach is adopted for accumulating desired information on identifying and categorizing the core indicators. The list of KPIs established in an earlier paper is narrowed down considering the future research needs suggested by the literature. Findings – The quantifiable and measurable core indicators are identified and categorized in the form of a list. The core indicators are defined and the variables required to quantify them are described by citing peer-reviewed literature. Research limitations/implications – This paper represents the first step toward establishing a relevant list of quantifiable and measurable core KPIs. Future research papers could emphasize derivation of mathematical expressions for determining the identifi.
Linking customer verbal aggression and service sabotage

– The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanisms that link customer verbal aggression with service sabotage. Additionally, this study also tests whether emotional dissonance mediates the relationships between customer verbal aggression and the revenge motive, and between customer verbal aggression and service sabotage. , – This study investigated flight attendants from six airlines in Taiwan. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed, resulting in the return of 504 valid questionnaires, yielding a valid response rate of 50.4 percent. , – The findings demonstrate that: emotional dissonance mediates the relationship between customer verbal aggression and revenge motive; emotional dissonance mediates the relationship between customer verbal aggression and service sabotage; customer verbal aggression is positively related to the revenge motive; revenge motive positively relates to service sabotage. , – This study has investigated the following: how customer verbal aggression causes revenge motive via the mediation of emotional dissonance, how customer verbal aggression results in service sabotage via the mediation of emotional dissonance. The results provide a basis for making suggestions regarding service management as a reference for airlines.
flesh journeys: neo primitives and the contemporary rediscovery of radical body modification

Viewing the body as both an evocative social text and a vehicle of social resistance, this article explores recent developments within the Neo Primitive (NP) movement. As a segmented branch of the larger body modification cultural scene, Neo Primitives have created individuals have created a renaissance of deeply flamboyant and often radical body marking practices. Members stress the spiritual, emotional, and practical rewards of body modification for those entrenched within (and ultimately oppressed by) hegemonic boundaries of physical expression in the modern metropolis, especially as those boundaries relate to codes of beauty, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and personal creativity. Building on qualitative data gathered in two Canadian cities, and viewing members of this subculture as active agents of counter-expression and dissent, this article explores the ideologies, practices, and lived experiences of NPs attempting to recreate, reclaim, and revolutionize the flesh.
Comparative Gastric Morphometry of Muong Indigenous and Vietnamese Wild Pigs

It is hypothesized that despite sharing a similar habitat, the Muong indigenous and Vietnamese wild pigs may reveal different gastric morphology. Due to the protective nature of procuring these pigs, a total of 12 Muong indigenous pigs and nine Vietnamese wild pigs stomach collected post mortem were analysed for selected biometric parameters and histology. The result indicated that the stomach of the Vietnamese wild pig is broader with a bigger capacity and greater proportion of proper gastric glands. Interestingly, the stomach mass correlated well with live body weight in both breeds apart from possessing similar histomorphometry of the gastric gland regions. On the other hand, the thicker (P < 0.05) submucosa in the Vietnamese wild pig is attributed to the presence of numerous loose connective tissues, abundant blood vessels, adipose tissues and nerve plexus. The appearance of lymphoid follicles underneath the tubular gastric glands in the Vietnamese wild pig exceeded that of Muong indigenous pigs. This finding suggested that the difference in feeding behavior as well as immunity. In conclusion, adaptations found in the Vietnamese wild pig indicated that this breed is equipped with a bigger and effectively functional stomach to suit its digestive physiology and immunity in the wild.
Fully abstract denotational semantics for flat Concurrent Prolog

A denotational, hence, compositional semantics for a subset of Concurrent Prolog is developed and related to an operational semantics. The denotational semantics makes divergence and the resultant substitutions of finite computations together with the termination mode-success, failure, or deadlock-observable. Relative to this notion of observation it is proved that the denotational semantics is fully abstract in the sense that it records the minimal amount of extra information beyond the observables to make it compositional. Full abstraction is an important property because it quantifies the information that one needs in order to reason about individual program-parts independently. This is believed to be the first such result in the area of concurrent logic programming. <<ETX>>
Two Clustering Preprocessing Techniques for Large-Scale Circuits

In this paper, two effective preprocessing techniques for clustering large-scale circuits are presented. These techniques can be performed before the general multilevel clustering to enhance the speed of the partitioning technique while preserving the solution quality. A "wrapped" version of hMETIS is implemented, in which the proposed techniques are applied as the preprocessing step. The empirical results on standard benchmark circuits show that the application of the proposed techniques improves the over all runtime by 30% and the partitioning results by 2%.
Early and comprehensive management of atrial fibrillation: proceedings from the 2nd AFNET/EHRA consensus conference on atrial fibrillation entitled 'research perspectives in atrial fibrillation'.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is already an endemic disease, and its prevalence is soaring, due to both an increasing incidence of the arrhythmia and an age-related increase in its prevalence. Indeed, 1–2% of the population suffer from AF at present, and the number of affected individuals is expected to double or triple within the next two to three decades both in Europe and in the USA.1–4 Although epidemiological data for other parts of the world are less robust, a similar increase in AF in the community can be assumed in other countries. Atrial fibrillation causes marked morbidity and mortality on a population basis. Epidemiological observations suggest that AF is still associated with a doubling of mortality, even after adjustment for confounders.2,5 This observation from the last millennium appears to continue into current randomized trials in AF patients. Also, AF is the single most important risk factor for ischaemic stroke. Furthermore, strokes associated with AF result more often in death or permanent disability than strokes that occur as a result of other aetiologies.6–9 The presence of AF is also associated with a marked reduction in everyday functioning and quality of life.10–13 The harm associated with AF and the perceived detrimental effects of the arrhythmia on general health contrast with the outcome of six trials that compared a ‘rate control’ therapy strategy, aiming at accepting AF and controlling the ventricular rate, with an antiarrrhythmic drug-based ‘rhythm control’ therapy strategy, aiming at maintenance of the ‘natural’ sinus rhythm. Apart from a slight improvement in 6 min walk test in a small trial14 and post hoc analyses,15 the outcome of patients randomized to rhythm control therapy was not better than patients randomized to rate control therapy,14,16–20 …
The Golgi matrix protein giantin is required for normal cilia function in zebrafish

ABSTRACT The Golgi is essential for glycosylation of newly synthesised proteins including almost all cell-surface and extracellular matrix proteoglycans. Giantin, encoded by the golgb1 gene, is a member of the golgin family of proteins that reside within the Golgi stack, but its function remains elusive. Loss of function of giantin in rats causes osteochondrodysplasia; knockout mice show milder defects, notably a cleft palate. In vitro, giantin has been implicated in Golgi organisation, biosynthetic trafficking, and ciliogenesis. Here we show that loss of function of giantin in zebrafish, using either morpholino or knockout techniques, causes defects in cilia function. Giantin morphants have fewer cilia in the neural tube and those remaining are longer. Mutants have the same number of cilia in the neural tube but these cilia are also elongated. Scanning electron microscopy shows that loss of giantin results in an accumulation of material at the ciliary tip, consistent with a loss of function of retrograde intraflagellar transport. Mutants show milder defects than morphants consistent with adaptation to loss of giantin. Summary: Morpholino knockdown of Golgb1/giantin leads to a severe cilopathy phenotype twinned with longer, misshapen cilia. Stable mutants have a very mild phenotype, indicative of compensation, but still have longer cilia.
Identification of a Novel G2073A Mutation in 23S rRNA in Amphenicol-Selected Mutants of Campylobacter jejuni

Objectives This study was conducted to examine the development and molecular mechanisms of amphenicol resistance in Campylobacter jejuni by using in vitro selection with chloramphenicol and florfenicol. The impact of the resistance development on growth rates was also determined using in vitro culture. Methods Chloramphenicol and florfenicol were used as selection agents to perform in vitro stepwise selection. Mutants resistant to the selective agents were obtained from the selection process. The mutant strains were compared with the parent strain for changes in MICs and growth rates. The 23S rRNA gene and the L4 and L22 ribosomal protein genes in the mutant strains and the parent strain were amplified and sequenced to identify potential resistance-associated mutations. Results C. jejuni strains that were highly resistant to chloramphenicol and florfenicol were obtained from in vitro selection. A novel G2073A mutation in all three copies of the 23S rRNA gene was identified in all the resistant mutants examined, which showed resistance to both chloramphenicol and florfenicol. In addition, all the mutants selected by chloramphenicol also exhibited the G74D modification in ribosomal protein L4, which was previously shown to confer a low-level erythromycin resistance in Campylobacter species. The mutants selected by florfenicol did not have the G74D mutation in L4. Notably, the amphenicol-resistant mutants also exhibited reduced susceptibility to erythromycin, suggesting that the selection resulted in cross resistance to macrolides. Conclusions This study identifies a novel point mutation (G2073A) in 23S rRNA in amphenicol-selected mutants of C. jejuni. Development of amphenicol resistance in Campylobacter likely incurs a fitness cost as the mutant strains showed slower growth rates in antibiotic-free media.
An Architecture for Diversity-aware Search for Medical Web Content

Summary Objectives: The Web provides a huge source of information, also on medical and health-related issues. In particular the content of medical social media data can be diverse due to the background of an author, the source or the topic. Diversity in this context means that a document covers different aspects of a topic or a topic is described in different ways. In this paper, we introduce an approach that allows to consider the diverse aspects of a search query when providing retrieval results to a user. Methods: We introduce a system architecture for a diversity-aware search engine that allows retrieving medical information from the web. The diversity of retrieval results is assessed by calculating diversity measures that rely upon semantic information derived from a mapping to concepts of a medical terminology. Considering these measures, the result set is diversified by ranking more diverse texts higher. Results: The methods and system architecture are implemented in a retrieval engine for medical web content. The diversity measures reflect the diversity of aspects considered in a text and its type of information content. They are used for result presentation, filtering and ranking. In a user evaluation we assess the user satisfaction with an ordering of retrieval results that considers the diversity measures. Conclusions: It is shown through the evaluation that diversity-aware retrieval considering diversity measures in ranking could increase the user satisfaction with retrieval results.
Computing 3-D optimal form-closure grasps

We address the problem of computing optimal fingertip locations yielding n-finger form-closure grasps of polyhedral objects. Given grasping points of m fingers not in form-closure, we show that the calculation of optimal grip points for the n-m fingers can be viewed as a nonlinear programming problem. We propose a sufficient and necessary condition for the n-m fingers to achieve an n-finger form-closure grasp with the m fingers given. Based on this condition, we derive a set of nonlinear constraints for the nonlinear programming problem. Furthermore, we give a performance index serving as an objective function which measures the distance between the center of mass of the grasped object and the contact points to be determined. In addition, the algorithm proposed can be applied to the frictionless grasp. We have implemented the algorithm and verified its efficiency by two examples.
Stimulus-Response and Individual-Response Specificity

There has been an increasing interest among psychophysiologists in the question of how physiological response systems are organized. Some investigators have argued that autonomically mediated responses to stimulation are determined by the quality of the stimulus, whereas others have argued that the responses are idiosyncratic, i.e., independent of the stimulus and unique to the responder. A great deal of confusion has resulted from the fact that this issue has been phrased as an either-or question. The present study is an attempt to show that autonomic response patterns are a function of both stimulus and subject. The issue is to a great extent confounded with the more general psychological problem of stimulus definition. If a stimulus is defined as that which the experimenter manipulates, then, obviously, all variations in responses occurring during repetitions of the stimulus must be attributed to changes within the individual subjects. If, on the
An investigation of basic facial expression recognition in autism spectrum disorders

This study was designed to test three competing hypotheses (impaired configural processing; impaired Theory of Mind; atypical amygdala functioning) to explain the basic facial expression recognition profile of adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In Experiment 1 the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series were presented upright and inverted. Individuals with ASD were significantly less accurate than controls at recognising upright facial expressions of fear, sadness and disgust and their pattern of errors suggested some configural processing difficulties. Impaired recognition of inverted facial expressions suggested some additional difficulties processing the facial features. Unexpectedly, the clinical group misidentified fear as anger. In Experiment 2 feature processing of facial expressions was investigated by presenting stimuli in a piecemeal fashion, starting with either just the eyes or the mouth. Individuals with ASD were impaired at recognising fear from the eyes and disgust from the mouth; they also confused fearful eyes as being angry. The findings are discussed in terms of the three competing hypotheses tested.
Binaural Cochlear Implants Placed during the Same Operation

Objective To evaluate the binaural listening advantages for speech in quiet and in noise and to localize sound when independently programmed binaural cochlear implants are used, and to determine whether ears with different hearing ability and duration of profound deafness perform differently with cochlear implants as well as to what extent preimplant psychophysical and physiologic assessment could be predictive of performance. Study Design Prospective study in which patients were prospectively selected to undergo bilateral implantation during a single surgical procedure at a tertiary referral center. All testing was performed with patients using their right, left, or both cochlear implants. Preimplant and intraoperative measures used electrical stimulation at the round window and stimulation through the cochlear implant. Results Bilateral implantation during the same operation did not cause any postoperative problems such as severe vertigo or ataxia. At 1 year, results of speech testing in quiet demonstrated a binaural advantage for 2 of 10 subjects. Speech-in-noise testing demonstrated that two implants were beneficial for two individuals. All subjects benefited from a head shadow effect when an ear with a better signal-to-noise ratio was available. The ability to localize sound was improved with binaural implants in all subjects. Preimplant psychophysical or physiologic measures were not predictive of eventual speech perception performance. Conclusion Binaural cochlear implants can assist in the localization of sounds and have the potential in some individuals to improve speech understanding in quiet and in noise.
Reducing Cluster Energy Consumption through Workload Management

Energy consumption is a major and costly problem in data centers. For many workloads, a large fraction of energy goes to powering idle machines that are not doing any useful work. There are two causes of this inefficiency: low server utilization and a lack of power proportionality. We focus on addressing this problem for two workloads: (1) a traditional, front-end web server workload and (2) an emerging class of analytics workload containing both batch jobs and interactive queries. For the web server workload of the first study, we present NapSAC, a design for a power-proportional cluster consisting of a power-aware cluster manager and a set of heterogeneous machines. Our design makes use of currently available energy-efficient hardware, mechanisms for transitioning in and out of low-power sleep states, and dynamic provisioning and scheduling to continually adjust to workload and minimize power consumption. We build a prototype cluster which runs Wikipedia to demonstrate the use of our design in a real environment. For the MapReduce workload in the second study, we develop BEEMR (Berkeley Energy Efficient MapReduce), an energy efficient MapReduce workload manager motivated by empirical analysis of real-life traces at Facebook. The key insight is that although MIA clusters host huge data volumes, the interactive jobs operate on a small fraction of the data, and thus can be served by a small pool of dedicated machines; the less time-sensitive jobs can run on the rest of the cluster in a batch fashion. With our designs we are able to reduce energy consumption while maintaining acceptable response times. Our results for NapSAC show that we are able to achieve close to 90% of the savings of a theoretically optimal provisioning scheme would achieve. With BEEMR, we achieve 40-50% energy savings under tight design constraints, and represents a first step towards improving energy efficiency for an increasingly important class of datacenter workloads.
Contribution to the Creation and Recognition of the Design Patterns Instances

Design patterns introduced very useful way of improving the quality of the software development processes. There were introduced several solutions trying to support developers with their utilization. In our work we will describe two approaches supporting their employment: first one is dealing with their instantiation, the second one is dealing with their recognition in the existing source code. Our first approach presents the support for pattern instance creation in semi automatic way. The main idea of this approach is that the developer should suggest the pattern occurrence and specify the desired variants of the pattern he wishes to employ. The valid pattern instance customized to meet all user requirements in the most ideal way will be created by the CASE tool. The second approach focuses on improvement of the recognition processes that often suffer by too high false-positive recognition ratio (they mark some code fragments as the pattern instance, but in reality they are not). To reduce this ratio we have incorporated the dynamic analysis that is being focused of examination of the system execution into the overall recognition process.
Virtual machine support for dynamic join points

A widespread implementation approach for the join point mechanism of aspect-oriented languages is to instrument areas in code that match the static part of pointcut designators, inserting dynamic checks for that part of matching that depends on run-time conditions, if needed. For performance reasons, such dynamic checks should be avoided whenever possible. One way to do so is to postpone weaving of advice calls until run-time, when conditions determining the emergence of join points hold. This calls for fluid code---code that adapts itself to the join point emergence at run-time, and suggests that AOP concepts should be integrated into the execution model underlying a VM. In this paper, we present first steps toward such an integration in Steamloom, an extension of IBM's Jikes Research Virtual Machine. Steamloom is fairly restricted, but our initial experimental results indicate that aspect-aware VMs and fluid code are promising w.r. t performance. While the focus in this paper is on performance, there are other advantages of aspect-aware VMs to be investigated in the future.