Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trusted Framework for Secured Information Storage over Cloud Environment

Cloud orchestration involves cloud resources scaling up and down, management, as well as manipulation to better respond user’s requests and to facilitate operational objectives of the service providers. These promote the elastic nature of cloud platform but force upon significant challenges to cloud service providers. Particularly, security issues such as inconsistency may arise while dynamic changes such as virtual machine migration occur. In this paper, we intend to tackle this problem, specifically for intrusion detection/ prevention and VPN/IPsec as main security mechanisms. More precisely, we propose a systematic verification approach to check the compliance of security configurations. To this end, we first elaborate on two properties, namely intrusion monitoring configuration preservation and VPN/IPsec protection configuration preservation. Then, we derive a set of formulas that compare security configurations before and after migration. This allows reasoning on whether the aforementioned security properties hold. To this end, we encode these formulas as constraint satisfaction problems.
Relationship Between Financial Risk and Financial Performance: An Insight of Indian Insurance Industry

Insurance companies are in the business of taking risks. Worldwide these companies write policies that deal with specific risks, and in many cases, even underwrite exotic risks. Therefore, obtaining coverage for every insurable risk is being replaced by the risk management concept. Risk management, which includes insurance coverage, is intended to minimise the costs associated with assuming certain types of risk and providing prudent protection. Managing risks is an important factor which insurance companies must attend to, if they are to achieve financial performance. From this perspective, the financial risk management has gained due importance for financial institutions and risk management has become one of the most important practices to be used especially in insurance companies in order to get higher returns. Therefore, this study is endeavoured to ascertain the relationship between financial risk and financial performance of insurance companies in India. The results of the multiple linear regression model reveals that capital management risk, solvency risk, liquidity risk, volume of capital and size of company are most important determinants of financial performance of life insurance companies in India, whereas ROA (proxy measure for financial performance) has statistically insignificant relationship with underwriting risk. The study led to the conclusion that 54.7 percent changes in financial performance of life insurance companies in India could be accounted for by changes in capital management risk, solvency risk, liquidity risk, underwriting risk, size of the company and volume of capital. The study established the fact that risks like capital management risk, solvency risk and underwriting risk are the deterrent factors for the financial performance of life insurance companies in India. The study also led to the conclusion that size of a company, volume of capital and more surprisingly liquidity risk are the pull factors for the financial performance of life insurance companies. On the basis of these findings, the study recommends that there is greater need for life insurance companies in India to manage the risks particularly capital management risk and solvency risk more effectively. The study also recommends that there is a dire need for insurance companies in India to increase their size by enhancing their assets base since it was found that size is an important factor influencing their competitive power and financial performance.
POMDPs for Continuous States and Observations for Robotics

Motion planning in uncertain and dynamic environments is an essential capability for autonomous robots. Partially observable Markov decision processes provide a principled mathematical framework to support decision-making problems [1] in such environments. Existing approaches, such as [2] [3] [4], provide approximate offline solutions to POMDP problems formulated with an assumption of a discrete state, observation and action space. The real world is, however, continuous and dynamic. Thus, the assumption of discrete spaces limits the ability of a learning algorithm to learn precise and robust control policies desirable in applications related to robotics. Owing to the dynamic nature of the environment in which robotic agents operate, an online planning algorithm that alternates between planning and execution is more desirable. To this end, we explore the existing online planning algorithm POMCP[3], and extend it to account for continuous state and hybrid observations but discrete action spaces. We propose two approaches to enable the POMCP algorithm to handle continuous observations by partitioning the continuous observation space. In our first approach, we create equal partitions manually of predefined range of continuous values. In the second approach, we generate partitions during planning, on-the-fly. Partitioning the observation space in such a way encapsulates the existing POMCP algorithm from continuous observations, so that it can work seamlessly in its original framework. We specifically focus on a grasping problem in robotics by simulating a two dimensional partially observable environment housing a manipulator and a target body. We experiment with the performance of the extended POMCP algorithm to handle continuous states and hybrid observation spaces and compare it against that of a memory-less policy learned by imitation learning to solve the grasping problem. We present the results of our experiments with the approaches proposed.
Transferred, Ultrathin Oxide Bilayers as Biofluid Barriers for Flexible Electronic Implants

The work presented here introduces a materials strategy that involves physically transferred, ultrathin layers of silicon dioxide (SiO2) thermally grown on silicon wafers and then coated with hafnium oxide (HfO2) by atomic layer deposition, as barriers that satisfy requirements for even the most challenging flexible electronic devices. Materials and physics aspects of hydrolysis and ionic transport associated with such bilayers define their performance and reliability characteristics. Systematic experimental studies and reactive diffusion modeling suggest that the HfO2 film, even with some density of pinholes, slows dissolution of the underlying SiO2 by orders of magnitude, independent of the concentration of ions in the surrounding biofluids. Accelerated tests that involve immersion in phosphate‐buffered saline solution at a pH of 7.4 and under a constant electrical bias demonstrate that this bilayer barrier can also obstruct the transport of ions that would otherwise cause drifts in the operation of the electronics. Theoretical drift–diffusion modeling defines the coupling of dissolution and ion diffusion, including their effects on device lifetime. Demonstrations of such barriers with passive and active components in thin, flexible electronic test structures highlight the potential advantages for wide applications in chronic biointegrated devices.
Microtubes and nanotubes of a phospholipid bilayer membrane

We propose a theory describing the stable structure of a phospholipid bilayer in pure water involving a spherical mother vesicle with long thin tubular protrusion. It is considered that the phospholipid molecules are in general anisotropic with respect to the axis normal to the membrane and can orient in the plane of the membrane if the curvature field is strongly anisotropic. Taking this into account, the membrane free energy is derived starting from a single-molecule energy and using methods of statistical mechanics. By linking the description on the microscopic level with the continuum theory of elasticity we recover the expression for the membrane bending energy and obtain an additional (deviatoric) contribution due to the orientational ordering of the phospholipid molecules. It is shown that the deviatoric contribution may considerably decrease the phospholipid vesicle membrane free energy if the vesicle involves regions where the difference between the two principal curvatures is large (thin cylindrical protrusions and/or thin finite necks) and thereby yields a possible explanation for the stability of the long thin tubular protrusions of the phospholipid bilayer vesicles. We report on the experiment exhibiting a stable shape of the spherical phospholipid vesicle with a long thin tubular protrusion in pure water.
Comparison between PFC Sigma Rotating Platform (standard design) and Buechel Pappas High-Flexion Total Knee Arthroplasties (A Randomized Controlled Study)

: The purpose of the present study was to compare the short term clinical and functional outcomes of PFC Sigma Rotating-Platform (standard design) with those of Buechel Pappas High-Flexion total knee replacements using Knee Society knee score and Functional knee score . 120 knees were randomly allocated to receive either a PFC Sigma Rotating-Platform (n=60) or Buechel Pappas High-Flexion (n=60) total knee prosthesis between January 2010 to December 2011, and were followed for an average mean period of 42.3 months . At the time of the latest follow-up, the average range of motion was 96.85 0 (range, 75 0 to 120 0 ) in the knees with a PFC Sigma Rotating–Platform prosthesis and 102.75 0 (range, 85 0 to 120 0 ) in the knees with a Buechell Pappas High-Flexion prosthesis. With a margin of 6 0 improvement in range of motion in Buechel Pappas High-Flexion knee replacements group, difference was statistically significant (p = 0.003).
Laparoscopic liver resection for hepatocellular carcinoma in patients with cirrhosis

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignant tumor and many cases occur in patients with liver cirrhosis. Although liver transplantation is the most effective treatment option, hepatectomy is still the first curative treatment option because liver transplantation is limited by the donors and high cost. In recent years, laparoscopic liver resection (LLR) has increasingly been performed in patients with liver cirrhosis, and has several advantages over open liver resection. Besides less pain and shorter hospital stay, LLR in patients with liver cirrhosis is also associated with lower incidences of postoperative liver failure and ascites because of greater preservation of collateral veins and less liver manipulation. With increasing experience, LLR for HCC located in segments 7 or 8 is now feasible, and anatomic LLR could be performed in patients with cirrhosis. Many comparative studies have shown that LLR is better than open liver resection in patients with liver cirrhosis in terms of a lower incidence of postoperative liver failure and similar patient survival. In conclusion, LLR is a promising treatment modality for HCC in patients with liver cirrhosis. ABSTRACT
Poverty Reduction and Human Capital Development in Nigeria ( 1980 – 2011 ) Author ’ s Detail :

It should be noted that poverty has a strong link and two-way relationship with health: poverty makes people more vulnerable to ill-health, and ill-health tends to lead to low productivity, hence poverty. It is against this background that this study makes use of time series data from the secondary source, on Nigerian economy for the period 1980 – 2011, obtained primarily from the National Bureau of statistic and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Bulletin, 2010 to explain the relationship among health, poverty and economic growth. It adopts some selected variables which have been tested valid as a measurement of health status and poverty measurement. The health care spending, life expectancy rate, fertility rate are used to capture health status, GDP per capita is used to measure the standard of living per head in Nigeria and unemployment rate to measure the level of poverty reduction in the economy while real GDP is used to capture economic growth. The results show that relationship between GDP per capital growth and the level of gross domestic is positive which satisfies the a priori condition. That is, a change in income will bring about 0.028 percentage change in the gross domestic product overtime but the variable is statistically insignificant using the probability value. The relationship between unemployment rate and economic growth is negative satisfying the a priori and statistically significant at 5% level. An indication that an increase in unemployment rate will reduce economic growth by 0.03 percent which affirms previous literatures on effect of unemployment on growth.
An Enhanced Keyword Search Using Flexible Ranking Over Differential Query Services in Cloud

Cloud computing has emerged as a major driver for reducing the information technology costs incurred by organizations. In a cost-sensitive environment, an organization is willing tolerate a certain threshold of delay while retrieving information from the cloud. We first review a private keyword-based file retrieval scheme that was EIRQ, users can retrieve the desired percentage of files by assigning ranks to queries. This feature is useful if the user is only interested in a subset of all the matched files . By further reducing the communication cost incurred on the cloud, the existing EIRQ schemes make the private searching technique more applicable to a cost-efficient cloud environment. The main drawback is, we simply determine the rank of each file by the highest rank of queries it matches. Since this ranking is not flexible. In this paper we present a more sophisticated ranking system by providing variable weights to the relevance attributes of each file. A flexible ranked search sorts the matches by relevance. This ranking allows the user to find the most (or least) relevant information quickly, rather than sorting through every match in the content collection. This approach improves the user friendly environment as well as it tries to focus on the reduction of communication cost
The Hot Interface : Emotional Motive Theory

This chapter presents a new model of emotional action that emphasizes an anticipatory control of emotional actions. It begins by reviewing existing hypotheses about a causal relationship between emotions and action. Then, findings and hypotheses of an ideomotor model are discussed about how an emotional action is learned, represented, activated, selected, and expressed. Finally, the model is applied to an analysis of emotional fight-and-flight behaviors.
IDP-ASE: haplotyping and quantifying allele-specific expression at the gene and gene isoform level by hybrid sequencing

Abstract Allele-specific expression (ASE) is a fundamental problem in studying gene regulation and diploid transcriptome profiles, with two key challenges: (i) haplotyping and (ii) estimation of ASE at the gene isoform level. Existing ASE analysis methods are limited by a dependence on haplotyping from laborious experiments or extra genome/family trio data. In addition, there is a lack of methods for gene isoform level ASE analysis. We developed a tool, IDP-ASE, for full ASE analysis. By innovative integration of Third Generation Sequencing (TGS) long reads with Second Generation Sequencing (SGS) short reads, the accuracy of haplotyping and ASE quantification at the gene and gene isoform level was greatly improved as demonstrated by the gold standard data GM12878 data and semi-simulation data. In addition to methodology development, applications of IDP-ASE to human embryonic stem cells and breast cancer cells indicate that the imbalance of ASE and non-uniformity of gene isoform ASE is widespread, including tumorigenesis relevant genes and pluripotency markers. These results show that gene isoform expression and allele-specific expression cooperate to provide high diversity and complexity of gene regulation and expression, highlighting the importance of studying ASE at the gene isoform level. Our study provides a robust bioinformatics solution to understand ASE using RNA sequencing data only.
desambiguación de oraciones de relativo : hablantes bilingües frente a estudiantes de L 2

RESUMEN Este estudio investiga las preferencias por la adjunción de la oración de relativo (OR) a un sintagma nominal (SN) complejo del tipo: SN1 de SN2, en los hablantes bilingües de español-inglés y los estudiantes avanzados de español. Los hablantes de español muestran una preferencia moderada por unir la OR al primer SN, mientras que los hablantes de inglés prefieren el segundo SN. Esta construcción se les presentó a los sujetos en su forma escrita (Experimento 1) y hablada (Experimento 2). De los resultados se desprende que ningún grupo tenía preferencia por una u otra adjunción en el contexto de la lectura silenciosa. Se prefería una Adjunción Baja con una pausa después del SN1 por parte de los estudiantes y una Adjunción Alta en ausencia de pausas por parte de los hablantes bilingües y los estudiantes. Sin embargo, el grupo de estudiantes mostró un comportamiento diferenciado durante el Experimento 2 en dos sentidos: sus tiempos de reacción fueron más cortos, y su elección del tipo de adjunción de la OR se veía condicionada en mayor medida por la ausencia de una pausa, resultando más probable que se optara por una Adjunción Baja, al igual que los hablantes monolingües de inglés. Estos resultados dan a entender que la influencia que ejerce su L1 en los estudiantes avanzados es mayor en la comprensión oral que en la lectura, mientras que a los bilingües les lleva más tiempo procesar las pistas prosódicas. Se plantean razones para explicar este procesado bilingüe más lento. Por último, estos resultados nos sirven para extraer algunas implicaciones relativas a la enseñanza de la prosodia.
Water‐use efficiency in response to climate change: from leaf to ecosystem in a temperate steppe

Water‐use efficiency (WUE) has been recognized as an important characteristic of ecosystem productivity, which links carbon (C) and water cycling. However, little is known about how WUE responds to climate change at different scales. Here, we investigated WUE at leaf, canopy, and ecosystem levels under increased precipitation and warming from 2005 to 2008 in a temperate steppe in Northern China. We measured gross ecosystem productivity (GEP), net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE), evapotranspiration (ET), evaporation (E), canopy transpiration (Tc), as well as leaf photosynthesis (Pmax) and transpiration (Tl) of a dominant species to calculate canopy WUE (WUEc=GEP/T), ecosystem WUE (WUEgep=GEP/ET or WUEnee=NEE/ET) and leaf WUE (WUEl=Pmax/Tl). The results showed that increased precipitation stimulated WUEc, WUEgep and WUEnee by 17.1%, 10.2% and 12.6%, respectively, but decreased WUEl by 27.4%. Climate warming reduced canopy and ecosystem WUE over the 4 years but did not affect leaf level WUE. Across the 4 years and the measured plots, canopy and ecosystem WUE linearly increased, but leaf level WUE of the dominant species linearly decreased with increasing precipitation. The differential responses of canopy/ecosystem WUE and leaf WUE to climate change suggest that caution should be taken when upscaling WUE from leaf to larger scales. Our findings will also facilitate mechanistic understanding of the C–water relationships across different organism levels and in projecting the effects of climate warming and shifting precipitation regimes on productivity in arid and semiarid ecosystems.
Information Technology Controls Quality and Audit Fees: Evidence From Italy

This study analyzes the impact of Information Technology (IT) Controls quality on control risk and audit fees. The impact is expected to occur when regulation increases sensitiveness to audit risk assessment. The research focuses on IT Controls as part of Internal Control over Financial Reporting, particularly on scoping quality, segregation of duties, and Controls framework compliance. The research was conducted with a questionnaire on a population of Italian listed companies. We find that audit fees are lower for higher IT scoping quality, IT Controls segregation of duties, and IT Controls framework compliance. The overall conclusion is that IT Controls quality is related to lower control risk, audit fees, and audit effort.
An Overview of the Methodological Approach to the in Vitro Study of Anti-Infective Biomaterials

Biomaterial-associated infections have an enormous impact in terms of morbidity of the patients and costs to national health systems. Perioperative antibiotics and aseptic procedures have not proved sufficient to eradicate the occurrence of this type of infections which often lead to devastating effects. Adjunctive strategies for preventing the establishment of infections are increasingly being centered on the development of new biomaterials with anti-infective properties. The creation of new anti-infective biomaterials can be obtained by alternative approaches oriented to achieve either bacteria-repellent surfaces or bioactive surfaces expressing self-sterilizing properties when not even able to treat preexisting infections in the surrounding tissues. Here, we offer a short overview of the currently available in vitro methods that can be used to investigate and assess the performance of anti-infective biomaterials, with special emphasis on those whose mechanism of action is based on bacteria-repellent surfaces.
Insects and indigenous knowledge in exhibitions and education with special reference to Mashonzha, the so-called mopane worm : Session IV : indigenous knowledge and exhibitions

From a cultural point of view, the mopane worm or Mashonzha is one of the most important insects in South Africa. However, when we started to work on the cultural uses of insects we soon found that there were people living in Mashonzha harvesting areas that do not know the life cycle of this insect. We also established that many people who know the life cycle or parts thereof, have a limited understanding of its consequences for sustainable harvesting. In our recent research we investigated the extent to which the life cycle is understood and the extent to which people are able to use it. Our results clearly show that there is a need for teaching aids such as posters to bring indigenous knowledge into the classroom, and our first poster on Mashonzha is mentioned as an example. We believe that Mashonzha can be developed as an icon for the teaching of sustainable harvesting, community involvement, complex life cycles and the use of indigenous knowledge as a basis from which to teach complex concepts in science and technology, and business management. This is strongly in line with the vision of the Minister of Science and Technology who has appealed to scientists to bring science and technology into the lives of the people. We discuss our progress and refer to plans for additional posters.
Like Mother, Like Father? Gender Assortative Transmission of Child Overweight

Parental influences on children health related behaviours are argued to be gender assortative (e.g., that maternal behaviour is more important for daughters), but research devoted to disentangling such effects is still at its infancy. We take advantage of a unique dataset (Health Survey for England) containing records of clinically measured weight and height for a representative sample of English children and their parents for the period 1996-2009. We examine the magnitude and change of the association between maternal and paternal overweight and that of their offspring by gender, alongside the combined parental effect. We aim at identifying the existence and the magnitude of a gender-assortative transmission of overweight after controlling for a long list of covariates, including time and survey-wave fixed effects. Our findings point out that the intergenerational transmission is most significant when both parents are obese or overweight, and the effects size increases with child age 0.7 percentage point among infants to 1.3-1.4 percentage points among schooled children and teenagers. However, we find weak evidence of a specific maternal effect on girls’ overweight, and more generally gender assortative intergenerational transmission of overweight and obesity.