Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safebook: A distributed privacy preserving Online Social Network

Online Social Network (OSN) applications and services such as picture sharing, wall posting, and the like, nowadays have a strong impact on the way users interact with each other. Catering for a broad range of users of all ages, and a vast difference in social, educational, and national background, these applications and services allow even users with limited technical skills to share a wide range of personal information with a theoretically unlimited number of partners. This advantage comes at the cost of increased security and privacy exposures for users for two main reasons: first of all, users tend to disclose private personal information with little guard, and secondly, existing OSN applications severely suffer from vulnerabilities in their privacy protection or the lack thereof. The exploitation of these vulnerabilities [1] can lead a malicious user to launch many different types of attacks such as Id theft, profile cloning or secondary data collection [2]. Furthermore, even assuming a perfect protection from such malicious users, legitimate users are still exposed to a major orthogonal privacy threat, since in all existing OSN applications, the service provider has access to all the data including some private information stored and managed by the application itself and can misuse such information easily. Since the access to users' private data is the underpinning of a promising business model, current OSN services are not likely to address this problem in the near future. Researchers recently proposed to design the OSN application based on a peer-to-peer architecture in order to avoid centralized control over users' data. While in one hand a peer-to-peer model seems to be a good candidate to build a privacy preserving solution that avoids centralized control, on the other hand it lacks any a priori trust relationships among parties.
Are there general laws in parasite ecology?

SUMMARY As a scientific discipline matures, its theoretical underpinnings tend to consolidate around a few general laws that explain a wide range of phenomena, and from which can be derived further testable predictions. It is one of the goals of science to uncover the general principles that produce recurring patterns in nature. Although this has happened in many areas of physics and chemistry, ecology is yet to take this important step. Ecological systems are intrinsically complex, but this does not necessarily mean that everything about them is unpredictable or chaotic. Ecologists, whose grand aim is to understand the interactions that govern the distribution, abundance and diversity of living organisms at different scales, have uncovered several regular patterns, i.e. widely observable statistical tendencies, in the abundance or diversity of organisms in natural ecosystems. Some of these patterns, however, are contingent, i.e. they are only true under particular circumstances; nevertheless, the broad generality of many patterns hints at the existence of universal principles. What about parasite ecology: is it also characterized by recurring patterns and general principles? Evidence for repeatable empirical patterns in parasite ecology is reviewed here, in search of patterns that are consistently detectable across taxa or geographical areas. The coverage ranges from the population level all the way to large-scale patterns of parasite diversity and abundance (or biomass) and patterns in the structure of host-parasite interaction networks. Although general laws seem to apply to these extreme scales of studies, most patterns observed at the intermediate scale, i.e. the parasite community level, appear highly contingent and far from universal. The general laws uncovered to date are proving valuable, as they offer glimpses of the underlying processes shaping parasite ecology and diversity.
Control Of Linear Multivariable Systems

1. Linear Multivariable Systems 1.1. Emergence of State Space Approach 1.2. Discrete-time Control 1.3. Riccati Equation and Stabilization for Continuous-time Systems 1.4. Design Procedure 1.5. Static Output Feedback and Dynamic Compensation 1.6. Servo Control and Internal Model Principle 1.7. Design and Analysis based on Frequency Response 1.8. Control System Example 2. Control System Example 2.1. Parameters of the system 2.2. Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketch
Foreign aid and inclusive education in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati: a question of ownership

ABSTRACT This study examines the influence of foreign aid and local ownership in the introduction of inclusive education in Kiribati. The data reported in this paper were collected through interviews with key local stakeholders and these data are part of a larger study. Data were analysed under the major theme of ownership, and were grouped into the four sub-themes of: local responses to inclusive education initiatives; support for inclusive education principles; local attitudes regarding the contribution of Australian Aid; and, sustainability with or without aid support. The results indicate that a positive commitment towards inclusive education is emerging and that Australian Aid provided essential advocacy for children with disabilities in Kiribati through direct management of initiatives by the expatriate administered Kiribati Education Facility. Inclusive education initiatives remain dependent on Australian Aid for direction and sustainability. Sustainability of inclusive education initiatives in Kiribati will depend on continued development of local ownership including community support and commitment by the Government of Kiribati, particularly budgetary support.
Prevalence of anemia among children with persistent diarrhea with a trial of zinc therapy

Across sectional study done at the Tikrit Teaching Hospital among children aged between 6 months and 5 years of age during the period from the 1 of July 2005 to the last of May 2006 aimed to study the prevalence of anemia among patients with persistent diarrhea. A total of 100 cases were eligible for inclusion in the study sample compared with 100 children with the same age group attending the out patient clinic of the same hospital for another reasons with no history of persistent diarrhea as a control sample which was selected randomly. The study shows that the prevalence of anemia among patients with persistent diarrhea was 69% compared with the control sample (49%). The most common age group affected with anemia was the second half of the first year of life 35 cases (85.3%), in comparison to 17 cases (60.7%) in the control group. Most of the cases (67%) came from the rural areas, so as the anemic cases (73.1%). Most of the study cases were on the bottle feeding (31%). Patients whose mothers are illiterate constitute a high proportion of the study cases (49%) and (77.5%) for anemia cases. The prevalence of malnutrition was significantly higher in children with persistent diarrhea (55%), (89.1%) of them were anemic, in comparison to the control group (19%), 68% of them were anemic. Fifty patients were treated with oral zinc supplements. It is clearly shown that the group of pateints with oral zinc supplements has decreased in the duration of diarrhea, number of stools per day and the duration of the hospital stay as compared with the no zinc supplement. The study recommends that the vicious circle of persistent diarrhea and malnutrition should be considered and managed and should consider that oral zinc supplement is an important line of treatment in such patients.
Evaluating Temporal Information Understanding with Temporal Question Answering

The temporal annotation scheme Time ML was developed to support research in complex temporal question answering (QA). Given the complexity of temporal QA, most of the efforts have focused, so far, on extracting temporal information, which has been evaluated with corpus-based evaluation. However, the QA task represents a natural way to evaluate temporal information understanding, and creating question sets is less costly for humans than manually annotating temporal information, which is required to perform corpus-based evaluation. Additionally, QA performance better captures the understanding of important temporal information as compared to corpus-based evaluation where all information is equally important for scoring. This paper presents a temporal QA system that performs temporal reasoning. It can be used to answer temporal questions (factoid, list and yes/no), about any document annotated in Time ML. In the paper, we show how this system can be used to evaluate automated temporal information understanding. Our QA-based evaluation results suggest that (i) the available temporal annotations are not complete, and (ii) QA provides a less costly and more reliable way of evaluating temporal understanding systems. To favour replicability, we made the temporal QA system and the question set used in the evaluation available.
Real price and affordability as challenges for effective tobacco control policies: an analysis for Argentina.

OBJECTIVE To describe the evolution of cigarettes' real price and affordability during the last decade in Argentina. METHODS To analyze the real price of cigarettes, the weighted average monthly price of a pack of 20 cigarettes was divided by the consumer price index (CPI) from 2004 to 2014. The relative income price (RIP) was evaluated for the same period, defining RIP as the percentage of the income required to buy 100 packs of 20-per-pack cigarettes. The RIP was calculated for first-quartile, median, and third-quartile income groups. The lower the RIP, the higher the affordability. RESULTS The nominal price of a pack of 20 cigarettes sold in Argentina increased from AR$ 2.24 in March 2004 to AR$ 14.36 in June 2014 (nominal price increase of about 19.7% per year). The real price fell from AR$ 2.24 in March 2004 to AR$ 2.11 in June 2014 (real price drop of about 0.6% per year). Between June 2004 and June 2014, the RIP decreased about 39% for the 3rd quartile income group (from 31.3% to 19.2%), about 42% for the median (from 55.7% to 32.0%), and about 50% for the 1st quartile (from 104.4% to 51.8%). CONCLUSIONS In Argentina, inflation and rising income were greater than growth in cigarette prices. Cigarette affordability increased for each income group, with the highest shifts occurring among the poorest and most vulnerable income earners. The increased affordability of cigarettes might reduce the impact of implemented tobacco control policies.
Research on Test Suite Reduction Using Attribute Relevance Analysis

Essence of software testing is to choose a representative value (known as test case) from the input to perform the programs under test. The actual results of the programs will be checked to verify the consistency with the expected ones. If the results are different, it should take some correction and adjustment correspondingly. The existing method for test suite generation is mainly based on the test requirements which are related to the given testing objectives. It generates the test suites directly. Inevitably, some data in those suites may be redundant and need to be reduced. In fact, test case selection is to make effective partition within the input, and then generate the cases of high-performance. Based on the conception of partition, this paper presents a method of test suite reduction by using data classification techniques which are introduced in data mining. This method tries to use attribute relevance analysis to find the interrelations of all attributes in test requirements, and then reduce the test suite with the most appropriate attributes and values.
Research Challenges in Extracting Personal Name Pseudonyms from the Web

A person may have multiple personal name aliases on the web. Identifying aliases of a name is useful in information retrieval and knowledge management, sentiment analysis, relation extraction and name disambiguation. The objective of detecting aliases from the web is to retrieve all the information pertaining to a personal name whose content is described with different nick names in different documents of web. As of now, web contains aliases of popular personalities in various domains like sports, politics, medicine, music, cinema etc., and does not contain alias information about common man. Recently, there are proven methods of extracting aliases through lexical pattern based retrieval tested using real-world name-alias pairs in Japanese and English as training data related to limited domains. In this paper, we discuss on how this information retrieval process has been grown now, and what the future directions are and also the scope of alias extraction in Inter-disciplinary fields.
Accurate Determination of the Lagrangian Bias for the Dark Matter Halos

We use a new method, the cross-power spectrum between the linear density field and the halo number density field, to measure the Lagrangian bias for dark matter halos. The method has several important advantages over the conventional correlation function analysis. By applying this method to a set of high-resolution simulations of 2563 particles, we have accurately determined the Lagrangian bias, over 4 mag in halo mass, for four scale-free models with the index n=-0.5, -1.0, -1.5, and -2.0 and three typical cold dark matter models. Our result for massive halos with M≥M* (M* is a characteristic nonlinear mass) is in very good agreement with the analytical formula of Mo & White for the Lagrangian bias, but the analytical formula significantly underestimates the Lagrangian clustering for the less massive halos, M<M*. Our simulation result, however, can be described satisfactorily, with an accuracy better than 15%, by the fitting formula of Jing for Eulerian bias under the assumption that the Lagrangian clustering and the Eulerian clustering are related with a linear mapping. It implies that it is the failure of the Press-Schechter theories for describing the formation of small halos that leads to the inaccuracy of the Mo & White formula for the Eulerian bias. The nonlinear effect in the mapping between the Lagrangian clustering and the Eulerian clustering, which was speculated as another possible cause for the inaccuracy of the Mo & White formula, must be negligible compared with the linear mapping. Our result indicates that the halo formation model adopted by the Press-Schechter theories must be improved, as independently stressed by Porciani et al.
Miniature potentials, light adaptation and afterpotentials in locust retinula cells.

SUMMARY In dark-adapted retinula cells of the locust, the miniature potentials or bumps have amplitudes of 3-7 mV when recorded in the dark-adapted state with bevelled electrodes at very low light levels. For a sample of N = 378 they had a mean amplitude of 4*55 mV and s.D. 1-59 mV. These are called dark-adapted bumps, and their distribution of amplitudes is presumably a component of the noise of the visual signal in addition to the irregularity of occurrence of bumps. The afterpotential which follows an intense flash is caused by the summation of bumps which become individually visible as they decline in frequency over a period of many minutes after the stimulus. When recorded over a period from 17 to 23 min after the stimulus, the amplitude of these light-induced dark bumps in a sample of N = 231 had a mean of 2-89 mV and s.D. of 0-92 mV. They also have a shorter duration than dark-adapted bumps. Light-adapted bumps, which are denned as bumps which arise when light of low intensity falls on light-adapted cells, are statistically indistinguishable in amplitude or duration from light-induced dark bumps. The reduction in size, as compared to dark-adapted bumps, cannot be attributed to a change in membrane potential or to an increase in membrane conductance, which actually decreases during the period of decline of the after-depolarization. Therefore in the light-adapted state, each bump is caused by the opening of fewer sodium channels, or of less effective sodium channels than in the dark-adapted state.
Effect of chronic high-intensity exercise on hunger and satiation and levels of acylated ghrelin and leptin in women

Summary Study aim: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of chronic high-intensity exercise training on hunger, satiation, related hormones and weight loss among women who are obese or overweight. Material and methods: The sample group was composed of 25 subjects, divided into two groups: a high-intensity exercise group (n = 15) intensity of 80-90% of maximum heart rate and a non-training control group (n = 10). The blood sample test was performed in two stages of rest, fasted state and before breakfast and an appetite questionnaire was completed. The training procedure was a high-intensity exercise, three sessions a week for twelve weeks and two hours after breakfast. Independent and dependent t-tests were used to analyze the data. Results: The results showed that high-intensity exercise caused a significant loss of weight (p = 0.01) and fat percentage (p = 0.001) and plasma insulin levels (p = 0.03), but it had no effect on hunger and satiation, calorie intake or plasma leptin. Also, it significantly increased the plasma acylated ghrelin (p = 0.04) and maximum oxygen consumption (p < 0.001). Conclusions: Based on the results of this study, it can be noted that high-intensity exercise is suitable for weight loss and not increasing hunger. The lack of calorie intake along with weight loss showed that negative energy balance caused no appetite compensatory responses. Also, high-intensity exercise stimulates physiological responses to increase appetite, but it did not affect the feeling of appetite. In other words, changes in mental and physiological appetite because of high-intensity exercise do not match.
Physically-based Animation of Humanoid Swimming

In this paper, we describe a dynamic control algorithm that allows a humanoid character to swim through a fluid. The swimming is physically-based, whereby the character applies simulated muscle forces in order to drive the body through the motions of a breaststroke. The interaction between the moving body parts and a fluid dynamics system results in drag forces that cause the swimmer’s body to be thrust forward. Directional control of the swimmer is achieved by applying various perturbations to the original stroke based on a desired trajectory. We analyze the results qualitatively by comparing our resulting animations against video footage of real swimmers.
Traumatic facial palsy

Facial nerve palsy may represent an important complication of head trauma yet, an adequate surgical treatment can reduce negative effects of such injuries. The surgical treatment usually consists of nerve decompression nerve anastomosis and graft technique with n. auricularis magnus. In this study a retrospective analysis of the patients treated from the traumatic facial palsy in a ten-year period was performed. The patients were divided into groups according to etiology and intensity of facial damage. Clinical examination, topodiagnostics, electrodiagnostics and radiography were applied as routine. The House Brackmann scale was used for evaluation of results of medicaments and surgical therapy. The traumatic facial palsy was mainly incomplete (62.9%) with other frequent otologic symptoms. The temporal bone fracture was verified in 88.6% of patients and an intraoperative lesion of the nerve was predominantly suprastapedial (69.2%). Edema of nerve and fracture line were usually found. Different surgical techniques were applied (decompression in 84%, termino-terminal anastomosis in 9% and nerve graft in 7% of cases). The recovery of the facial function was good and fast in idiopathic cases with a significant difference between complete and incomplete palsy. In surgical cases, the best recovery was achieved with decompression while nerve anastomosis and nerve graft had similar time course and outcome in the House grades. Conclusion: The surgical therapy in selected cases of peripheral facial palsy gives good results. The decompression of the nerve is significantly more effective than nerve anastomosis and nerve graft, concerning both time and outcome. The type of surgery and the results depend on etiology, intensity, location and time of treatment of the facial palsy.
Searching for Sense of Virtual Community in Social Hypertext

The role of social hypertext as an indicator of interaction and participation within an associated community is explored. Social network analytic measures are compared with the sense of virtual community that people interacting in several social hypertexts experience, as measured by a well known sense of virtual community questionnaire. The results of these case studies will be interpreted in terms of how well social network analytic measures of virtual community can identify and measure both the different types of community feeling within social hypertexts, and the corresponding amount of sense of virtual community experienced by different participants within the social hypertext. Alvin Chin University of Toronto 40 St. George Street, Room 8171 416-978-7581 achin@cs.toronto. edu http://www.imedia. mie.utoronto. ca/~achin PhD-Supervision: Mark Chignell Problem Statement and Research Question The problem that I am addressing in my PhD thesis research is how to find, measure and validate relationships between social hypertext structure and corresponding sense of virtual community. This sense of virtual community is hypothesized to be somewhat reminiscent of feelings that one would get whilst living in a physical community, and is expected to sometimes occur when interacting in a virtual hypertext environment. Identifying structural patterns that are indicative of community will help in discovering and tracking social behaviour and social trends. Companies have lots of data about themselves, their customers, their competitors, and their partners, and data comes from various sources such as blogs
Myocardial Contrast Echocardiography in the Evaluation of Hypertensive Heart Disease

Myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) has an established role in left ventricular assessment by improving the ventricular opacification and endocardial border definition especially in patients with sub-optimal echocardiographic images. With advances in cardiac ultrasound imaging technology and the development of new contrast agents, the clinical utility of this technique has greatly expanded to include assessment of coronary reperfusion in the setting of acute myocardial infarction, determination of myocardial viability within infarct zones as well as assessment of coronary microcirculation and flow reserve in patients with microvascular coronary disease. Improvements in image quality with intravenous contrast agents can facilitate image acquisition and enhance delineation of regional wall motion abnormalities at peak levels of exercise. Numerous studies have confirmed the clinical utility of contrast enhancement during echocardiographic studies, particularly in patients undergoing stress testing. In this paper, we explore the evidence in support of MCE and its potential clinical applications. Our review aims to summarize (1) the basic principles of myocardial contrast echocardiography including recent advances in the ultrasound technology and contrast agents (2) its clinical applications in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases and finally, (3) its potential role in risk stratification and assessment of microvascular perfusion in patients with hypertensive heart disease.