Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Privacy in the Mobile Hardware Space : Threats and Design Considerations

— Recent security reports [1,2,3] have highlighted the need for technology firms to develop products and services with the privacy of the end-user in mind. Social media, the proliferation of feature-rich mobile platforms and the Cloud Computing paradigm are transforming the way in which individuals store and share personal information. The new risks this ecosystem poses need to be studied and understood in order to create technology that effectively protects the users and their information. This paper is a survey of common privacy threats applicable to the hardware and embedded firmware of mobile platforms developed with System-on-a-Chip integrated circuits. It takes an information-centric approach to organize known privacy risks and mitigations that system architects may consider when designing a new device. Three fundamental privacy threat categories are used to guide the analysis of areas such as system debugging, device identification and over-the-air firmware updates. Current challenges and research opportunities (e.g., sensors, BYOD) are discussed throughout the document. Disclaimer: The present document discusses basic privacy risks and practical considerations for mobile hardware designers. It neither attempts to interpret security and privacy laws in any way, nor tries to become a product architecture reference or a implementation specification of any sort. I. INTRODUCTION redit card theft, exposure of personal information and malware are some concerns people may have when shopping and communicating with others online [1,2]. To some, these risks may not be very significant when considering the convenience of completing a commercial transaction remotely and having access to the vast catalogue of products and services available on the Internet. These benefits have been sufficient to convince users to send their purchase orders and payment information over a global public network that operates with limited regulation. Mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) are today the most common medium to access all sorts of electronic systems [2]. Their portability, communication and storage features supported by hardware and software components may give a sense of privacy, and even anonymity, to the millions of users that every day share
The Impact of Research Design Characteristics on the Evaluation and Use of Export Marketing Research: An Empirical Study

The literature on export marketing research has concentrated on issues surrounding the acquisition of research information, providing few insights into how acquired information is actually evaluated and used by decision makers. The present study focuses on research design characteristics and tests a number of hypotheses regarding their impact on the evaluation and use of export marketing research. The results show that the type of study (qualitative vs. quantitative), the type of sample (probability vs. nonprobability) and the sample size have no influence on either the evaluation or the subsequent use of export marketing research information. A comparison with previous findings in a domestic context is undertaken and a number of future research directions identified.
Secure Bio Semantic Computing Scheme

 Abstract — In this paper, the secure BioSemantic Scheme is presented to bridge biological/biomedical research problems and computational solutions via semantic computing. Due to the diversity of problems in various research fields, the semantic capability description language (SCDL) plays and important role as a common language and generic form for problem formalization. SCDL is expected the essential for future semantic and logical computing in Biosemantic field. We show several example to Biomedical problems in this paper. Moreover, in the coming age of cloud computing, the security problem is considered to be crucial issue and we presented a practical scheme to cope with this problem.
History and the Sizes of Cities

We contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes. Recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical advantages suggests that path dependence cannot be understood as the medium-run effect of legacy capital but instead as the long-run effect of equilibrium selection. In contrast, a different, recent literature uses stylized models in which fundamentals uniquely determine city size. We show that a commonly used model is inconsistent with evidence of long-run persistence in city sizes and propose several modifications that might allow for multiplicity and thus historical path dependence.
Regional Disparities in Regional Blocs: Theory and Policy

The objectives of this paper are to explore the forces that may create disparities within a regional bloc and to assess their implications for policy. The thesis we will argue is that it is quite possible for regional integration to create disparities. Indeed, we expect it to encourage differences in the economic structures of countries, and should not be surprised if these are sometimes also associated with difference in factor prices and income levels. However, the policy response to such integration induced disparities is, loosely stated, more integration. This paper was prepared for the Inter-American Development Bank project on 'Deepening Integration of MERCOSUR: Dealing with Disparities'.
Weighted Category Matching Algorithm in Sensor Cloud for rapid retrieval

Sensor-cloud is a relatively new interdisciplinary domain that combines the fields of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Cloud Computing. The major issue needs to be addressed in Sensor-Cloud is storage and retrieval of data. Data security is preserved by encrypting the sensor data before storing it into the cloud. On analysis of existing methods, there are two different issues, First issue; Encrypted Document matching is performed based on their plaintext keywords which is not suitable for sensor data and Second issue, subscribers are categorized based on their predicates. So, the storage space required is more. To overcome these issues, the paper proposes a new indexing structure which is suitable for sensor data and a new algorithm called Weighted Category Matching Algorithm (WCMA) for quick retrieval. On comparing with existing methods, the proposed WCMA algorithm achieves a better document retrieval and results are discussed in implementation details.
Patterns and Determinants of Habitat Occupancy by the Asian Elephant in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, India

Understanding species distribution patterns has direct ramifications for the conservation of endangered species, such as the Asian elephant Elephas maximus. However, reliable assessment of elephant distribution is handicapped by factors such as the large spatial scales of field studies, survey expertise required, the paucity of analytical approaches that explicitly account for confounding observation processes such as imperfect and variable detectability, unequal sampling probability and spatial dependence among animal detections. We addressed these problems by carrying out ‘detection—non-detection’ surveys of elephant signs across a c. 38,000-km2 landscape in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, India. We analyzed the resulting sign encounter data using a recently developed modeling approach that explicitly addresses variable detectability across space and spatially dependent non-closure of occupancy, across sampling replicates. We estimated overall occupancy, a parameter useful to monitoring elephant populations, and examined key ecological and anthropogenic drivers of elephant presence. Our results showed elephants occupied 13,483 km2 (SE = 847 km2) corresponding to 64% of the available 21,167 km2 of elephant habitat in the study landscape, a useful baseline to monitor future changes. Replicate-level detection probability ranged between 0.56 and 0.88, and ignoring it would have underestimated elephant distribution by 2116 km2 or 16%. We found that anthropogenic factors predominated over natural habitat attributes in determining elephant occupancy, underscoring the conservation need to regulate them. Human disturbances affected elephant habitat occupancy as well as site-level detectability. Rainfall is not an important limiting factor in this relatively humid bioclimate. Finally, we discuss cost-effective monitoring of Asian elephant populations and the specific spatial scales at which different population parameters can be estimated. We emphasize the need to model the observation and sampling processes that often obscure the ecological process of interest, in this case relationship between elephants to their habitat.
Assessing Effects of an Environmental Education Field Science Program Fostering Responsibility at an Urban Middle School

The study investigated the ability of an extracurricular program to influence environmental responsibility of sixth and seventh graders. The Children's Environmental Attitude and Knowledge Survey (CHEAKS) was evaluated for appropriateness in assessing the worth of this particular environmental education strategy emphasizing water quality fieldwork and technology. CHEAKS is designed with psychometric reliability and validity that may be used in comparing disparate programs. Wilcoxon two sample tests were used to analyze data gathered from two student groups; one participated in an "Enviro-Mentals Club"; the other received no treatment. Analysis showed no significant change in environmental attitudes between groups, but did show significance (p <= 0.05) in environmental knowledge growth. Therefore, the investigated program had marginal success in influencing environmental responsibility.
Anticoagulants prevent monocrotaline-induced hepatic parenchymal cell injury but not endothelial cell injury in the rat.

Monocrotaline (MCT) is a pyrrolizidine alkaloid plant toxin that produces hepatotoxicity in humans and animals. Human exposure to MCT occurs through consumption of contaminated grains and herbal medicines. Administration of MCT to rats stimulates activation of the coagulation system and fibrin deposition in the liver. Fibrin deposition occurs simultaneously with endothelial cell damage and prior to hepatic parenchymal cell injury. Accordingly, the hypothesis that activation of the coagulation system is required for MCT-induced liver injury was tested. Treatment of rats with either heparin or warfarin significantly reduced MCT-induced activation of the coagulation system and the increase in alanine aminotransferase activity in the plasma, a biomarker of hepatic parenchymal cell injury. Histopathological examination of liver sections revealed that heparin decreased parenchymal cell necrosis but did not affect central venular endothelial cell damage, congestion and dilation of the sinusoids, or hemorrhage in the liver. Morphometric analysis revealed that 28% of the area of livers from MCT-treated rats contained regions of coagulative necrosis, whereas less than 5% of the area of livers from rats treated with MCT and heparin contained these regions. By contrast, neither heparin nor warfarin prevented MCT-induced damage to endothelial cells in the liver as estimated by increased plasma hyaluronic acid concentration. These results suggest that activation of the coagulation system is required for MCT-induced parenchymal cell injury but not endothelial cell injury in the liver.
Coupling of dispersal and aggression facilitates the rapid range expansion of a passerine bird

Behaviors can facilitate colonization of a novel environment, but the mechanisms underlying this process are poorly understood. On one hand, behavioral flexibility allows for an immediate response of colonizers to novel environments, which is critical to population establishment and persistence. On the other hand, integrated sets of behaviors that display limited flexibility can enhance invasion success by coupling behaviors with dispersal strategies that are especially important during natural range expansions. Direct observations of colonization events are required to determine the mechanisms underlying changes in behavior associated with colonization, but such observations are rare. Here, we studied changes in aggression on a large temporal and spatial scale across populations of two sister taxa of bluebirds (Sialia) to show that coupling of aggression and dispersal strongly facilitated the range expansion of western bluebirds across the northwestern United States over the last 30 years. We show that biased dispersal of highly aggressive males to the invasion front allowed western bluebirds to displace less aggressive mountain bluebirds. However, once mountain bluebirds were excluded, aggression of western bluebirds decreased rapidly across consecutive generations in concordance with local selection on highly heritable aggressive behavior. Further, the observed adaptive microevolution of aggression was accelerated by the link between dispersal propensity and aggression. Importantly, our results show that behavioral changes among populations were not caused by behavioral flexibility and instead strongly implicate adaptive integration of dispersal and aggression in facilitating the ongoing and rapid reciprocal range change of these species in North America.
Pfairness Applied to EDF to Reduce Migration Overheads and Improve Task Schedulability in Multicore Platforms

This paper proposes a scheduler combining the concepts of EDF and pfairness using the worst fit heuristic function. In scheduling algorithms without pfairness, priority is not monitored closely in case of preemptions. An algorithm combining EDF and pfairness proposed in this paper overcomes this drawback. Here resources are granted in accordance to the task weight. Individually using either EDF or pfairness utilizes the resources to a greater extent, whereas a combination of both achieves better reduction in migration overheads. The algorithm has been simulated on Cheddar, a real time scheduling tool, and also on SESC, an architectural simulator on multicore platforms. The algorithm presented in this paper has been tested for 5000 random task sets. The results show that it reduces the migration overhead by 33% for partitioned task sets and by 38 % for hybrid task sets, and improves task schedulability by 37%, compared to conventional EDF.
Aligning Multiple Sequences with Genetic Algorithm

The alignment of biological sequences is a crucial tool in molecular biology and genome analysis. It helps to build a phylogenetic tree of related DNA sequences and also to predict the function and structure of unknown protein sequences by aligning with other sequences whose function and structure is already known. However, finding an optimal multiple sequence alignment takes time and space exponential with the length or number of sequences increases. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are strategies of random searching that optimize an objective function which is a measure of alignment quality (distance) and has the ability for exploratory search through the solution space and exploitation of current results.
A heteroassociative learning model robust to interference

Neuronal models of associative memories are recurrent networks able to learn quickly patterns as stable states of the network. Their main acknowledged weakness is related to catastrophic interference when too many or too close examples are stored. Based on biological data we have recently proposed a model resistant to some kinds of interferences related to heteroassociative learning. In this paper we report numerical experiments that highlight this robustness and demonstrate very good performances of memorization. We also discuss convergence of interests for such an adaptive mechanism for biological modeling and information processing in the domain of machine learning.
Maximum Entropy for the International Division of Labor

As a result of the international division of labor, the trade value distribution on different products substantiated by international trade flows can be regarded as one country’s strategy for competition. According to the empirical data of trade flows, countries may spend a large fraction of export values on ubiquitous and competitive products. Meanwhile, countries may also diversify their exports share on different types of products to reduce the risk. In this paper, we report that the export share distribution curves can be derived by maximizing the entropy of shares on different products under the product’s complexity constraint once the international market structure (the country-product bipartite network) is given. Therefore, a maximum entropy model provides a good fit to empirical data. The empirical data is consistent with maximum entropy subject to a constraint on the expected value of the product complexity for each country. One country’s strategy is mainly determined by the types of products this country can export. In addition, our model is able to fit the empirical export share distribution curves of nearly every country very well by tuning only one parameter.
Is Your Cloud-Hosted Database Truly Elastic?

Elasticity has been recognized as one of the most appealing features for users of cloud services. It represents the ability to dynamically and rapidly scale up or down the allocated computing resources on demand. In practice, it is difficult to understand the elasticity requirements of a given application and workload, and to assess if the elasticity provided by a cloud service will meet these requirements. In this experience paper, we take the position that a deep understanding of the capabilities of cloud-hosted database services is a crucial requirement for cloud users in order to bring forward the vision of deploying data-intensive applications on cloud platforms. We argue that it is important that cloud users become able to paint a comprehensive picture of the relationship between the capabilities of the different type of cloud database services, the application characteristics and workloads, and the geographical distribution of the application clients and the underlying database replicas. We discuss the current elasticity capabilities of the different categories of cloud database services and identify some of the main challenges for deploying a truly elastic database tier on cloud environments. Finally, we propose a benchmarking mechanism that can evaluate the elasticity capabilities of cloud database services in different application scenarios and workloads.
Copy-Move Forgery Detection Algorithm for Digital Images and a New Accuracy Metric

Authenticity of digital images plays important role in various fields like medical, legal, criminal, and journalism. In this paper we propose a method to detect copy move forgery by block matching in spatial domain. The algorithm is tested on a developed database. We further propose a new quantitative metric to measure the accuracy and robustness of any copy-move detection algorithm.
Analyzing teaching performance of instructors using data mining techniques

Student evaluations to measure the teaching effectiveness of instructor's are very fre- quently applied in higher education for many years. This study investigates the factors associated with the assessment of instructors teaching performance using two different data mining tech- niques; stepwise regression and decision trees. The data collected anonymously from students' evaluations of Management Information Systems department at Bogazici University. Additionally, variables related to other instructor and course characteristics are also included in the study. The results show that, a factor summarizing the instructor related questions in the evaluation form, the employment status of the instructor, the workload of the course, the attendance of the students, and the percentage of the students filling the form are significant dimensions of instructor's teaching performance.
Estimating the Uncertainty of Average F1 Scores

In multi-class text classification, the performance (effectiveness) of a classifier is usually measured by micro-averaged and macro-averaged F1 scores. However, the scores themselves do not tell us how reliable they are in terms of forecasting the classifier's future performance on unseen data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to explicitly modelling the uncertainty of average F1 scores through Bayesian reasoning.
The business cycle of European countries Bayesian clustering of country - individual IP growth series

In the present paper, time series on industrial production growth of individual countries are used to investigate the following questions: (i) Is there a common growth cycle for the euro area countries? (ii) Did the synchronization change over time? (iii) Can we discriminate between a "European" and an "overseas" cycle? (iv) Which countries follow the "overseas" rather than the "European" cycle? To obtain the inference, I use an autoregressive panel data framework whereby the groups of co-moving countries are estimated adaptively along with the model parameters using Bayesian simulation methods.
Planar, Lightweight, Circularly Polarized Crossed Dipole Antenna for Handheld UHF RFID Reader

A planar, lightweight, crossed dipole antenna with circularly polarized (CP) radiation is introduced for application in a radiofrequency identification handheld reader at ultrahigh frequency bands. The dipoles cross through a 90° phase‐delay line of a vacant‐quarter printed ring that enables broadband characteristic in terms of impedance matching and 3‐dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidths. Four printed inductors are symmetrically inserted into the dipole arms whose ends are barbed to achieve a compact size. A sample antenna with a size of 60 × 60 × 0.508 mm and weight of 3.6 g is designed, fabricated, and measured. The proposed antenna yields an impedance bandwidth of 851–941 MHz for |S11| < −10 dB and a 3‐dB AR bandwidth of 902–921 MHz. At 910 MHz, the antenna radiates bidirectional CP waves with a gain of 1.4 dBic and an AR of 1.1 dB. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:1874–1878, 2013
Fair Value Accounting and Loan Loss Provisioning- Early Evidence from Nigerian Banking Industry

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Loan Loss Provisioning under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and Nigerian Prudential Guidelines. The audited first time annual reports of four Nigerian banks were analysed. Simple percentages and tables were used to determine the relationships between the figures thrown out by the two provisioning models. We found that prudential guidelines provisions were more aggressive and higher in all cases than IFRS provisions. In other words, the profit figures under prudential guideline model were more conservative than the corresponding figures under the IFRS model. The result of the study was based on 1 year 2012 audited first time IFRS accounts of 4 Nigerian banks and therefore cannot be generalised but regarded as rather indicative of the differences between the two models. The paper has practical implications for Nigerian regulatory authorities and in particular the CBN who may wish to retain its Loan Loss Provisioning Model or transmute to the IFRS model. This is about the first study on Nigerian banks on this subject matter post mandatory adoption of IFRS in 2012 and, has added to our knowledge of IFRS Loan Loss Provisioning compared to the Nigerian Prudential guideline model. Key Words: IFRS, Fair value, Prudential Guidelines, Loan Loss, Early Evidence.
Evaluation of Radial and Hierarchical Opinion Visualization Techniques

hierarchical opinion visualization techniques. The objective of this work is to evaluate the selected visualizations based on a set of information visualization metrics. A questionnaire survey was used as an instrument to collect response from users on a 3-point Likert scale. The data were collected by s conducting seminar and an online questionnaire (N=146). Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. The results revealed that the tree map is rated higher than other visualizations in terms of visual appeal, understandability, user friendliness, effectiveness, and usefulness.