Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protecting TLS-SA implementations for the challenge-response feature of EMV-CAP against challenge collision attacks

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) session-aware user authentication (TLS-SA) can be used to protect SSL/TLS-based e-commerce applications against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. The main idea is to make the user authentication depend not only on the user's credentials, but also on state information related to the SSL/TLS session in which the credentials are transferred to the server. This, in turn, allows the server to detect inconsistencies caused by an MITM. There are many possibilities to implement TLS-SA and to make a user authentication scheme be SSL/TLS session-aware. In this paper, we take the challenge-response (C/R) feature of the Europay International, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV) Chip Authentication Program (CAP) as an example, and we argue that a TLS-SA implementation for this feature is appropriate but susceptible to challenge collision attacks. We then pick challenge collision attacks out as a central theme, and elaborate on a possible protection mechanism. Assuming that the adversary has no access to the browser's graphical user interface (GUI) and cannot retrieve the EMV-CAP challenge accordingly, the level of protection against challenge collision attacks can be improved considerably by non-deterministically derivating the challenge from information related to the SSL/TLS session and using encryption to turn a challenge into a response. If the adversary has read access to the browser's GUI, then this approach is counterproductive, and if the adversary even has write access, then the use of EMV-CAP is insecure and problematic in the first place. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Rates of species loss from Amazonian forest fragments

In the face of worldwide habitat fragmentation, managers need to devise a time frame for action. We ask how fast do understory bird species disappear from experimentally isolated plots in the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, central Amazon, Brazil. Our data consist of mist-net records obtained over a period of 13 years in 11 sites of 1, 10, and 100 hectares. The numbers of captures per species per unit time, analyzed under different simplifying assumptions, reveal a set of species-loss curves. From those declining numbers, we derive a scaling rule for the time it takes to lose half the species in a fragment as a function of its area. A 10-fold decrease in the rate of species loss requires a 1,000-fold increase in area. Fragments of 100 hectares lose one half of their species in <15 years, too short a time for implementing conservation measures.
Rapid Chromosome Evolution in Recently Formed Polyploids in Tragopogon (Asteraceae)

Background Polyploidy, frequently termed “whole genome duplication”, is a major force in the evolution of many eukaryotes. Indeed, most angiosperm species have undergone at least one round of polyploidy in their evolutionary history. Despite enormous progress in our understanding of many aspects of polyploidy, we essentially have no information about the role of chromosome divergence in the establishment of young polyploid populations. Here we investigate synthetic lines and natural populations of two recently and recurrently formed allotetraploids Tragopogon mirus and T. miscellus (formed within the past 80 years) to assess the role of aberrant meiosis in generating chromosomal/genomic diversity. That diversity is likely important in the formation, establishment and survival of polyploid populations and species. Methodology/Principal Findings Applications of fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) to natural populations of T. mirus and T. miscellus suggest that chromosomal rearrangements and other chromosomal changes are common in both allotetraploids. We detected extensive chromosomal polymorphism between individuals and populations, including (i) plants monosomic and trisomic for particular chromosomes (perhaps indicating compensatory trisomy), (ii) intergenomic translocations and (iii) variable sizes and expression patterns of individual ribosomal DNA (rDNA) loci. We even observed karyotypic variation among sibling plants. Significantly, translocations, chromosome loss, and meiotic irregularities, including quadrivalent formation, were observed in synthetic (S0 and S1 generations) polyploid lines. Our results not only provide a mechanism for chromosomal variation in natural populations, but also indicate that chromosomal changes occur rapidly following polyploidisation. Conclusions/Significance These data shed new light on previous analyses of genome and transcriptome structures in de novo and establishing polyploid species. Crucially our results highlight the necessity of studying karyotypes in young (<150 years old) polyploid species and synthetic polyploids that resemble natural species. The data also provide insight into the mechanisms that perturb inheritance patterns of genetic markers in synthetic polyploids and populations of young natural polyploid species.
FFT based data perturbation method in WSN routing

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. Although the content of sensor messages describing “events of interest” may be encrypted to provide confidentiality, the context surrounding these events may also be sensitive and therefore should be protected from eavesdroppers. An adversary armed with knowledge of the network deployment, routing algorithms, and the base-station (data sink) location can infer the temporal patterns of interesting events by merely monitoring the arrival of packets at the sink, thereby allowing the adversary to remotely track the spatio-temporal evolution of a sensed event. One of the most notable challenges threatening the successful deployment of sensor systems is privacy. Although many privacy-related issues can be addressed by security mechanisms, one sensor network privacy issue that cannot be adequately addressed by network security is source-location privacy.
An empirical study on global software development: offshore insourcing of IT projects

The objective of this paper is to present lessons learned from a case study conducted in a Brazilian software development unit owned by a multinational organization. The focus of this study is to understand the factors that enable multinationals and virtual corporations to operate successfully across geographic and cultural boundaries. Since the number of organizations distributing their software development processes worldwide keeps increasing, this change is having a profound impact not only on marketing and distribution but also on the way products are conceived, designed, constructed, tested, and delivered to customers. Our results show empirical results towards the identification of problems the organizations involved in offshore insourcing of IT projects have faced when going global.
A New Khmer Palm Leaf Manuscript Dataset for Document Analysis and Recognition: SleukRith Set

Analysis of ancient Khmer documents can be quite challenging due to the elaborated shape of Khmer handwritten characters combined with the complex structure of how words are formed from those characters. Palm leaf manuscripts, one of the most well-known old Khmer documents, have been being digitized and centralized; therefore, document analysis functions such as text search capabilities are necessary but still remain unavailable for this type of documents. In order to contribute to the progress of relevant researches, we introduce in this paper a new dataset called SleukRith set comprising of 657 pages of Khmer palm leaf manuscripts randomly selected from various collections whose quality and digitization method are variable. The dataset contains three types of data: isolated characters, words, and lines. Each type of data is annotated with the ground truth information which is very useful for evaluating and serving as a training set for common document analysis tasks such as character/text recognition, word/line segmentation, and word spotting. In order to serve as a base line, the result of an evaluation study of Khmer isolated character recognition that we have conducted on SleukRith Set using Convolutional Neural Network is also presented.
Women and the Provision of Criminal Justice Advice: Lessons from England and Wales 1944–1964

This article provides an analysis of the role of the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders in the provision of policy advice to the government in the years after the Second World War and highlights the role of its women members, who mainly owed their appointment as advisors to their expertise gained in the voluntary role of Justice of the Peace. The article first contrasts the voluntary workers’ supposedly ‘amateur’ status with the mainly ‘professional’ credentials of the Council's other members and the relevance of the conventional distinctions made between the two types of experience is questioned. There follows an evaluation of the Council's impact on criminal justice policy in the period 1944–64. The article concludes that the clearest case for the Council's effectiveness can be made with regard to its early years but that the replacement of ‘amateur’ policy advice by criminological research in the post-1945 era was by no means a sudden process, and certainly not one that was completed by the 1960s. It suggests that in the light of the formation of Britain's first peace-time coalition government in nearly 80 years, the time might be ripe for a reconsideration of the role of voluntary sector representatives in the provision of policy advice.
Emotional and Informational Content of Commercials: Visual and Auditory Circumplex Spaces, Product Information and Their Effects on Audience Evaluation

Abstract The present pilot research determines commercials' visual and auditory circumplex space of affective states and the influence of both emotional and informative content and of their running time in an audience's evaluation of TV commercials. A key methodological factor takes into account, on the one hand, the measurement of emotional content as expression of affective states and, on the other, the distinctions made between the auditory and visual characteristics of commercials. Results show, visual and auditory emotional circumplex spaces of commercials which are rich, positive and active, and a conceptualization of visual emotional richness. On the other hand, results also show a positive influence of visual emotional richness in commercials evaluation as entertaining or exciting. Also, as previous research has shown, there is a positive influence of information content in commercial evaluation as informative.
Tight Enforcement of Information-Release Policies for Dynamic Languages

This paper studies the problem of securing information release in dynamic languages. We propose (i) an intuitive framework for information-release policies expressing both what can be released by an application and where in the code this release may take place and (ii) tight and modular enforcement by hybrid mechanisms that combine monitoring with on-the-fly static analysis for a language with dynamic code evaluation and communication primitives. The policy framework and enforcement mechanisms support both termination-sensitive and insensitive security policies.
Concept-based biomedical text retrieval

One challenging problem for biomedical text retrieval is to find accurate synonyms or name variants for biomedical entities. In this paper, we propose a new concept-based approach to tackle this problem. In this approach, a set of concepts instead of keywords will be extracted from a query first. Then these concepts will be used for retrieval purpose. The experiment results show that the proposed approach can boost the retrieval performance and it generates very good results on 2005 TREC Genomics data sets.
Taxonomic Relation Extraction from Wikipedia : Datasets and Algorithms

The dynamic and continuously growing category structure of Wikipedia has been used in numerous ontology extraction methods. We present a dataset of category subgraphs automatically extracted from Wikipedia that are manually annotated for is-a and instance-of relations in order to enable a more comprehensive evaluation of taxonomy mining approaches. We also show how the new dataset can be used with a rich set of features to train accurate taxonomy extraction models.
When Memory Is Not Enough: Electrophysiological Evidence for Goal-dependent Use of Working Memory Representations in Guiding Visual Attention

Biased competition theory proposes that representations in working memory drive visual attention to select similar inputs. However, behavioral tests of this hypothesis have led to mixed results. These inconsistent findings could be due to the inability of behavioral measures to reliably detect the early, automatic effects on attentional deployment that the memory representations exert. Alternatively, executive mechanisms may govern how working memory representations influence attention based on higher-level goals. In the present study, we tested these hypotheses using the N2pc component of participants' event-related potentials to directly measure the early deployments of covert attention. Participants searched for a target in an array that sometimes contained a memory-matching distractor. In Experiments 1 to 3, we manipulated the difficulty of the target discrimination and the proximity of distractors, but consistently observed that covert attention was deployed to the search targets and not the memory-matching distractors. In Experiment 4, we showed that when participants' goal involved attending to memory-matching items, these items elicited a large and early N2pc. Our findings demonstrate that working memory representations alone are not sufficient to guide early deployments of visual attention to matching inputs and that goal-dependent executive control mediates the interactions between working memory representations and visual attention.
Exercise Training Preserves Ischemic Preconditioning in Aged Rat Hearts by Restoring the Myocardial Polyamine Pool

Background. Ischemic preconditioning (IPC) strongly protects against myocardial ischemia reperfusion (IR) injury. However, IPC protection is ineffective in aged hearts. Exercise training reduces the incidence of age-related cardiovascular disease and upregulates the ornithine decarboxylase (ODC)/polyamine pathway. The aim of this study was to investigate whether exercise can reestablish IPC protection in aged hearts and whether IPC protection is linked to restoration of the cardiac polyamine pool. Methods. Rats aging 3 or 18 months perform treadmill exercises with or without gradient respectively for 6 weeks. Isolated hearts and isolated cardiomyocytes were exposed to an IR and IPC protocol. Results. IPC induced an increase in myocardial polyamines by regulating ODC and spermidine/spermine acetyltransferase (SSAT) in young rat hearts, but IPC did not affect polyamine metabolism in aged hearts. Exercise training inhibited the loss of preconditioning protection and restored the polyamine pool by activating ODC and inhibiting SSAT in aged hearts. An ODC inhibitor, α-difluoromethylornithine, abolished the recovery of preconditioning protection mediated by exercise. Moreover, polyamines improved age-associated mitochondrial dysfunction in vitro. Conclusion. Exercise appears to restore preconditioning protection in aged rat hearts, possibly due to an increase in intracellular polyamines and an improvement in mitochondrial function in response to a preconditioning stimulus.
Block RLS algorithm for surveillance video processing based on image sparse representation

Block recursive least square (BRLS) algorithm for dictionary learning in compressed sensing system is developed for surveillance video processing. The new method uses image blocks directly and iteratively to train dictionaries via BRLS algorithm, which is different from classical methods that require to transform blocks to columns first and then giving all training blocks at one time. Since the background in surveillance video is almost fixed, the residual of foreground can be represented sparsely and reconstructed with background subtraction directly. The new method and framework are applied in real image and surveillance video processing. Simulation results show that the new method achieves better representation performance than classical ones in both image and surveillance video.
Adolescent-Parent Death Attitude Resemblance in Kuwaiti and Sudanese Families

The present study determined the family resemblance in death anxiety and death depression in Kuwait and in the Sudan. There were moderate correlations between Death Anxiety Scale (Templer, 1970) and Death Depression Scale (Templer, Lavoie, Chalgujian, & Thomas-Dobson, 1990) scores of adolescents and their parents and between the scores of the mothers and fathers. The correlations tended to be higher in death depression than in death anxiety, and it was speculated that such may not have been found if the more recently constructed Death Depression Scale-Revised (Templer et al., 2002) had been used. The present findings mesh with family resemblance death attitude research in the United States and in the Philippines in indicating a transmission of death attitude in the family context. Differences in the pattern of correlations were interpreted in terms of cultural differences.
Intravenous zoledronic acid in postmenopausal women with low bone mineral density.

BACKGROUND Bisphosphonates are effective agents for the management of osteoporosis. Their low bioavailability and low potency necessitate frequent administration on an empty stomach, which may reduce compliance. Gastrointestinal intolerance limits maximal dosing. Although intermittent intravenous treatments have been used, the optimal doses and dosing interval have not been systematically explored. METHODS We studied the effects of five regimens of zoledronic acid, the most potent bisphosphonate, on bone turnover and density in 351 postmenopausal women with low bone mineral density in a one-year, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Women received placebo or intravenous zoledronic acid in doses of 0.25 mg, 0.5 mg, or 1 mg at three-month intervals. In addition, one group received a total annual dose of 4 mg as a single dose, and another received two doses of 2 mg each, six months apart. Lumbar-spine bone mineral density was the primary end point. RESULTS There were similar increases in bone mineral density in all the zoledronic acid groups to values for the spine that were 4.3 to 5.1 percent higher than those in the placebo group (P<0.001) and values for the femoral neck that were 3.1 to 3.5 percent higher than those in the placebo group (P<0.001). Biochemical markers of bone resorption were significantly suppressed throughout the study in all zoledronic acid groups. Myalgia and pyrexia occurred more commonly in the zoledronic acid groups, but treatment-related dropout rates were similar to that in the placebo group. CONCLUSIONS Zoledronic acid infusions given at intervals of up to one year produce effects on bone turnover and bone density as great as those achieved with daily oral dosing with bisphosphonates with proven efficacy against fractures, suggesting that an annual infusion of zoledronic acid might be an effective treatment for postmenopausal osteoporosis.
Cultural diversity in hospitality work

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the growing importance of migrant workers to the hospitality industry of peripheral locations in the UK.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on data collected through in‐depth surveys of and focus group discussions with migrant workers in hotels in three peripheral locations in the UK.Findings – Findings point to varied experiences for international workers in terms of recruitment and selection of international workers; their work‐related and social integration within the workforce and the wider community; aspirations for training and development among international employees; insights into the futures that migrant workers see for themselves; and their overall experience of living and working in the UK.Research limitations/implications – The study is located in three regions of the UK and each study is of relatively small scale. This is a potential limitation but compensation is afforded by the depth of information collected in each location.Pract.
Hybrid Genetic Algorithm with PSO Effect for Combinatorial Optimisation Problems

In engineering field, many problems are hard to solve in some definite interval of time. These problems known as “combinatorial optimisation problems” are of the category NP. These problems are easy to solve in some polynomial time when input size is small but as input size grows problems become toughest to solve in some definite interval of time. Long known conventional methods are not able to solve the problems and thus proper heuristics is necessary. Evolutionary algorithms based on behaviours of different animals and species have been invented and studied for this purpose. Genetic Algorithm is considered a powerful algorithm for solving combinatorial optimisation problems. Genetic algorithms work on these problems mimicking the human genetics. It follows principle of “survival of the fittest” kind of strategy. Particle swarm optimisation is a new evolutionary approach that copies behaviour of swarm in nature. However, neither traditional genetic algorithms nor particle swarm optimisation alone has been completely successful for solving combinatorial optimisation problems. Here a hybrid algorithm is proposed in which strengths of both algorithms are merged and performance of proposed algorithm is compared with simple genetic algorithm. Results show that proposed algorithm works definitely better than the simple genetic algorithm.
Are the Winters 2010 and 2012 Archetypes Exhibiting Extreme Opposite Behavior of the North Atlantic Jet Stream

AbstractThe atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic–European sector experienced exceptional but highly contrasting conditions in the recent 2010 and 2012 winters (November–March, with the year dated by the relevant January). Evidence is given for the remarkably different locations of the eddy-driven westerly jet over the North Atlantic. In the 2010 winter the maximum of the jet stream was systematically between 30° and 40°N (south jet regime), whereas in the 2012 winter it was predominantly located around 55°N (north jet regime). These jet features underline the occurrence of either weak flow (2010) or strong and persistent ridges throughout the troposphere (2012). This is confirmed by the very different occurrence of blocking systems over the North Atlantic, associated with episodes of strong cyclonic (anticyclonic) Rossby wave breaking in 2010 (2012) winter. These dynamical features underlie strong precipitation and temperature anomalies over parts of Europe, with detrimental impacts on many soc.
Satellite orbit determination based on gradient method

In this paper, gradient method is applied to the problem of satellite orbit determination. We used the ground station data (range, azimuth and elevation), for calculating the satellite position vector in the ECI frame. Satellite orbit is in the elliptic shape and satellite turns in orbital plane. Hence, orbit frame (PQW) is defined. Based on representation of input data in the PQW frame, we can define an ellipse. With the characteristics of an ellipse, beside definition of cost function and optimization technique, the satellite orbit is determined. This method, which can be easily implemented in hardware with moderate computational complexity, yield an efficient satellite positioning without assuming a prior knowledge of measurement noise. The performance, accuracy and error of algorithm are checked, by a test case.