Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
IP Traffic Measurements between IP Service Providers (ISP)

The existing Internet evolved from the ARPANET, an experimental data network founded by U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1960s. The entire technology is supported by a Datagram model, where each packet carries the complete source and destination address and is individually and independently delivered to its destination through the network. The adoption of the TCP/IP Protocol took place in mid-1980s. This evolution became crucial to inter-connect different networks in the world and to render a universal service to applications. The current Internet service is often referred to as a best effort. Best effort service is the simplest type of service that a network can offer; this service does not provide full reliability, since the delivery of packets is not guaranteed. However, best effort service is not the best service to support current applications, such as real-time and multimedia applications, because this service does not guarantee packet delivery to the destination and the packets can have a large delay variation. Nowadays, the Internet is the world’s largest public network. The web also serves as a platform for the deployment of new applications such as streamed multimedia services, Voice over IP (VoIP), peer-to-peer (P2P), and real time applications. This evolution of the Internet has brought new challenges. Many of the applications need a very good network performance to support their service requirements. So it was defined the following objective: Quality of Service (QoS) for Internet. Internet QoS is defined as a measurable level of service delivered to network users, which can be characterized by a set of metrics (e.g., packet loss probability, delay, jitter or delay variation, available bandwidth, throughput). Such QoS can be provisioned by network service providers in terms of a service agreement (e.g., a Service Level Agreement or SLA) between subscribers and providers. A QoS mechanism is a set of protocols designed to endow network devices to serve the competing applications in Internet differently by following a set of predefined policies. The role of policies in a QoS mechanism is to determine when a network device should serve packets of a particular application in the presence of packets from other contending applications. Traffic measurements give a very good perspective of what is going on all over the network. In Europe measurement between ISP’s are performed by a non-profit center: RIPE NCC. These measurements could be used to supervise and monitor intra and inter-domain traffic. RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens / NCC Network Coordination Center) offers the service of network management known as Test Traffic Measurements (TTM). It allows to comprehensively and continuously monitoring the connectivity between specific networks and with other parts of the Internet. Measurements carried out with TTM includes one way delays between hosts (latency), packet losses, path information (”traceroute”),
A Toolkit for ARB to Integrate Custom Databases and Externally Built Phylogenies

Researchers are perpetually amassing biological sequence data. The computational approaches employed by ecologists for organizing this data (e.g. alignment, phylogeny, etc.) typically scale nonlinearly in execution time with the size of the dataset. This often serves as a bottleneck for processing experimental data since many molecular studies are characterized by massive datasets. To keep up with experimental data demands, ecologists are forced to choose between continually upgrading expensive in-house computer hardware or outsourcing the most demanding computations to the cloud. Outsourcing is attractive since it is the least expensive option, but does not necessarily allow direct user interaction with the data for exploratory analysis. Desktop analytical tools such as ARB are indispensable for this purpose, but they do not necessarily offer a convenient solution for the coordination and integration of datasets between local and outsourced destinations. Therefore, researchers are currently left with an undesirable tradeoff between computational throughput and analytical capability. To mitigate this tradeoff we introduce a software package to leverage the utility of the interactive exploratory tools offered by ARB with the computational throughput of cloud-based resources. Our pipeline serves as middleware between the desktop and the cloud allowing researchers to form local custom databases containing sequences and metadata from multiple resources and a method for linking data outsourced for computation back to the local database. A tutorial implementation of the toolkit is provided in the supporting information, S1 Tutorial. Availability: http://www.ece. drexel.edu/gailr/EESI/tutorial.php.
Critical perspectives on information systems: an impression of the research landscape

This article complements a paper in an earlier special issue of this volume of the Journal of Information Technology which was entitled ‘What Does it Mean to be “Critical” in IS Research? ’ That paper conducted a preliminary review of the state of critical thinking in the fields of information systems (IS) and organization. In addressing the question ‘what is critical research? ’ it showed how its definition has changed and broadened over time. This paper follows on by opening up some key questions relating to why researchers in IS should view critical research as having a valuable contribution to make. It begins by considering the apparently wide range of researchers for whom critical research has become an activity. Noting earlier calls for more empirical research, the paper looks at some examples of specific empirical applications. This leads us to consider how critical research impacts upon actual IS praxis, in particular the role of the IS professional, systems development and changes in the nature of organizational life itself. This is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the literature. Rather by drawing upon a sample of material covering a range of perspectives it aims to give an impression of the many developments in critical studies on organization and IS and to consider their implications for future direction.
Spin-label study of hemoglobin conformations in solution.

There is now a great deal of physical and chemical evidence that horse and human hemoglobins undergo a change of protein conformation on oxygenation. ' 9 The molecular mechanism whereby these hemoglobins show cooperative or sigmoidal oxygen binding has remained obscure, however. In order to understand this "heme-heme" interaction, one must obtain structural information on partially oxygenated hemoglobin molecules in solution. The present paper is a preliminary report of our study of oxygen-linked conformational changes in hemoglobin, using the spin-label technique. We also discuss the relation between conformational changes and allosteric interactions such as the cooperative binding of oxygen to hemoglobin. Materials and Methods. -Horse and human hemoglobins were prepared according to the method of Benesch and Benesch'0 from fresh defibrinated horse blood (W. T. Bennett Ranch Laboratory) and from samples obtained through the courtesy of Dr. Marcus Krupp, Palo Alto Medical Clinic. The spin label, N-(1-oxyl-2,2,5,5-tetramethyl-3-pyrrolidinyl)iodoacetamide (I),
The Mitsuda reaction in persons with and without household exposure to leprosy.

It is a well established fact that persons exposed to lepromatous leprosy in the household have a much higher risk of contracting leprosy than persons who are not subject to such exposure but who are apparently comparable in other respects. In the studies of the Leonard Wood Memorial (American Leprosy Foundation) and the Department of Health of the Philippines carried out in Cordova and Talisay. eebu, Philippines. the relative risks for these two groups were found to be about eight to one (4) . The risk for those exposed to the tuberculoid type was less than twice as high as for unexposed persons. The prevalence of leprosy as determined by examination of the entire population was 20.4 per 1,000 for Cordova in 1948, and 17.6 per 1,000 for Talisay in 1950-51. About one-third of the cases in each locality were of the lepromatous type. In view of the emphasis being given to reactivity to lepromin, either acquired naturally or induced by BCG, as an indication of resistance, a comparison of the results of the lepromin test in persons known to have lived in household association with leprosy patients with the results in other persons resident in these municipalities is of timely interest. Chatterjee (1) found that children with family contact showed a lower percentage of lepromin reactors than tasual contacts or noncontacts of similar ages. Apparently the chance of becoming positive WBI le8llened by cloae contact. Cochrane et a.l (2) reported a similar result, but the numbers of healthy contact and noncontact children included were small. Souza Campot tit al (7) tested 185 children, 2 to 16 years of age, of leprous parenti. Of these, 148 were separated at birth from their parenti, and 87 were separated after varying intervals of exposure up to several months. The ages are not given in detail. The percentages of Mitauda reactors were 89.2 for the exposed children, and 48.0 for those separated at birth. A different type of study was made by Dharmendra and Jaikaria (8 ), who compared lepromin results obtained on 295 penona in Bankura, West Bengal, where leprosy was highly prevalent, with those on 270 penona in villages in the Punjab where it was uncommon. The percentagea of penona of all agea who reacted to lepromin were 59.0 in Bankura and 86.0 in the Punjab. Age distributiona are given, and adjustment for differences, uaing the total population of both areas as a standard, changes these figu.rea to 61.9 per cent and 32.7 per cent, respectively. Accepting the comparison aa fair in other respects, lepromin politivCf! wcre twicc na f requent In a n area where leprosy waa frequent 81 in one where it wall uncommon.
Moderators and mediators in social work research: Toward a more ecologically valid evidence base for practice

• Summary: Evidence-based practice involves the consistent and critical consumption of the social work research literature. As methodologies advance, primers to guide such efforts are often needed. In the present work, common statistical methods for testing moderation and mediation are identified, summarized, and corresponding examples, drawn from the substance abuse, domestic violence, and mental health literature, are provided. • Findings: Analyses of these third variable effects can provide an optimal fit for the complexity involved in the provision of evidence-based social work services. While a moderator may identify the trait or state requirement for a causal relationship to occur, a mediator is concerned with the transmission of that relationship. In social work practice, these are questions of ‘under what conditions and for whom? ’ and of the ‘how? ’ of behavior change. • Implications: Implications include a need for greater attention to these methods among practitioners and evaluation researchers. With knowledge gained through the present review, social workers can benefit from a more ecologically valid evidence base for practice.
Mosaic: Enabling Application-Transparent Support for Multiple Page Sizes in Throughput Processors

Contemporary discrete GPUs support rich memory management features such as virtual memory and demand paging. These features simplify GPU programming by providing a virtual address space abstraction similar to CPUs and eliminating manual memory management, but they introduce high performance overheads during (1) address translation and (2) page faults. A GPU relies on high degrees of thread-level parallelism (TLP) to hide memory latency. Address translation can undermine TLP, as a single miss in the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) invokes an expensive serialized page table walk that often stalls multiple threads. Demand paging can also undermine TLP, as multiple threads often stall while they wait for an expensive data transfer over the system I/O (e.g., PCIe) bus when the GPU demands a page. In modern GPUs, we face a trade-off on how the page size used for memory management affects address translation and demand paging. The address translation overhead is lower when we employ a larger page size (e.g., 2MB large pages, compared with conventional 4KB base pages), which increases TLB coverage and thus reduces TLB misses. Conversely, the demand paging overhead is lower when we employ a smaller page size, which decreases the system I/O bus transfer latency. Support for multiple page sizes can help relax the page size trade-off so that address translation and demand paging optimizations work together synergistically. However, existing page coalescing (i.e., merging base pages into a large page) and splintering (i.e., splitting a large page into base pages) policies require costly base page migrations that undermine the benefits multiple page sizes provide. In this paper, we observe that GPGPU applications present an opportunity to support multiple page sizes without costly data migration, as the applications perform most of their memory allocation en masse (i.e., they allocate a large number of base pages at once). We show that this en masse allocation allows us to create intelligent memory allocation policies which ensure that base pages that are contiguous in virtual memory are allocated to contiguous physical memory pages. As a result, coalescing and splintering operations no longer need to migrate base pages.
A Wearable Multi-Modal Bio-Sensing System Towards Real-World Applications

Multi-modal bio-sensing has recently been used as effective research tools in affective computing, autism, clinical disorders, and virtual reality among other areas. However, none of the existing bio-sensing systems support multi-modality in a wearable manner outside well-controlled laboratory environments with research-grade measurements. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by developing a wearable multi-modal bio-sensing system capable of collecting, synchronizing, recording, and transmitting data from multiple bio-sensors: PPG, EEG, eye-gaze headset, body motion capture, GSR, etc., while also providing task modulation features including visual-stimulus tagging. This study describes the development and integration of various components of our system. We evaluate the developed sensors by comparing their measurements to those obtained by a standard research-grade bio-sensors. We first evaluate different sensor modalities of our headset, namely, earlobe-based PPG module with motion-noise canceling for ECG during heart-beat calculation. We also compare the steady-state visually evoked potentials measured by our shielded dry EEG sensors with the potentials obtained by commercially available dry EEG sensors. We also investigate the effect of head movements on the accuracy and precision of our wearable eye-gaze system. Furthermore, we carry out two practical tasks to demonstrate the applications of using multiple sensor modalities for exploring previously unanswerable questions in bio-sensing. Specifically, utilizing bio-sensing, we show which strategy works best for playing “Where is Waldo? ” visual-search game, changes in EEG corresponding to true vs. false target fixations in this game, and predicting the loss/draw/win states through bio-sensing modalities while learning their limitations in a “Rock-Paper-Scissors” game.
ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITY OF SOME ACTINOMYCETES ISOLATED FROM SOILS OF ALBORZ PROVINCE, IRAN

Screening of microorganisms for the production of novel antibiotics has been intensivelypursued for many years by scientists. Actinomycetes have the capability to synthesize manydifferent antibiotics. A total of 69 actinomycete isolates were recovered from soil samplescollected from Alborz Province. Selected colonies (rough, chalky) of actinomycetes werepurified. All screened isolates were identified morphologically and physiologically. And all ofthem belong to the Streptomyces genus. These were then assessed for their antibacterial activityagainst pathogenic bacteria. Four pathogenic test strains were used in this study includingStaphylococcus aureus ATCC 6538, Bacillus subtilis ATTC 6633, Klebsiella pneumoniaeATTC 10031, and Escherichia coli ATCC 29998. Determination of antibacterial activities ofisolated actinomycetes performed by using modified spektra-plak method and Mueller Hintonagar (Oxoid) plates. Antagonism was detected by formation of inhibition zone. Results of thestudy indicated that 12 isolates were active against S. aureus, 15 isolates against B. subtilis, sixisolate against K. pneumonia, and four isolate were active against E. coli.
STABILITY OF PATTERN PLACED REVETMENT ELEMENTS

A revetment of pattern placed elements, or a so called pitching, is used worldwide to protect shorelines and embankments. Also in The Netherlands more than 500 km of river, lake and sea dikes is protected by pitchings. Until the 60’s the design and construction of pitchings was based on experience. After the first damages on pitchings and the negative assessment results, an intensive investigation program on pitchings was carried out. The results are commonly used nowadays in the Dutch dike reinforcement works. When comparing pattern placed block revetments with other revetments, the remarkable difference is that the amount of material to be used is significantly less than when using loose riprap. However placing blocks is more labour intensive. This is a specific advantage for countries with a large inexpensive labour force. In China, Vietnam and Bangladesh these are very common constructions. The leakage length L, describing the relationship between top layer elements and sublayer properties, is the most important design parameter; a small leakage length is favourable for the stability of the pitching. The maritime commission of PIANC has in 2007 decided to start a working group to make a small document on the design of pattern placed revetment elements. This PIANC MARCOM working group 57 report is now available (PIANC report 114, 2011). This paper presents an outline of this new knowledge of pattern placed block revetments, required for assessment and design purposes usable all over the world. It follows more or less the contents of the new PIANC report.
Syntactic focus movement and ellipsis : a minimalist approach

Summary by the author 1. IntroductionEllipsis is generally understood as a process whichaffects a phrase under identity with an antecedentphrase. There are two approaches to ellipsis. One isthe interpretive approach: the elided part is generatedas a phonetically null element and a copying processprovides an interpretation to the elided part at LF(Wasow, 1972; Williams, 1977). The other is thedeletion approach: the elided part is generated as afull category and then is deleted under identity withits antecedent part (Sag, 1976). As pointed out in Lasnik (1995), given Chomsky(1995) Move-F, no LF operation can create a relevantconﬁguration required for ellipsis since only formalfeatures move in LF by economy. In order for anoperation to create an ellipsis site, it must be overtrather than covert. If the licensing conﬁguration ofellipsis is created before Spell-Out, then ellipsis couldbe a PF deletion phenomenon. This is the basic tenetthat I assume in this study. In general, this studyattempts to give a cross-linguistic account of certainellipsis phenomena as prior movement of remnantsfollowed by PF deletion of XP, an account which isconsistent with the claim that ellipsis involves a PFdeletion process rather than an LF copying one(Chomsky & Lasnik, 1993). In this summary, I conﬁnemy discussion of ellipsis to Pseudogapping andSluicing in English, Korean, and Japanese. Due tosyntactic similarity, I assume that Korean and Japan-ese pattern together in relevant respects.2. PseudogappingAgreeing with Jayaseelan’s (1990) idea that an ellipsisrule affects only a continuous portion of the structure,Lasnik (1995, 1999) argues that English Pseudogap-ping is PF deletion of VP, with the remnants havingmoved to SpecAgr in overt syntax, in a split VPstructure (Koizumi, 1995):(1)John eats apples, and [
An interpretable machine learning model of biological age

Background: Assessments of biological (rather than chronological) age derived from patient biochemical data have been shown to strongly predict both all-cause and disease-specific mortality. However, these population-based approaches have yet to be translated to the individual. As well as using biological age as a research tool, by being able to better answer the question “why did we get this result? ”, clinicians may be able to apply personalised interventions that could improve the long-term health of individual patients. Methods: Here, the boosted decision tree algorithm XGBoost was used to predict biological age using 39 commonly-available blood test results from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) database. Results: Interrogation of the algorithm produced a description of how each marker contributed to the final output in a single individual. Additive explanation plots were then used to determine biomarker ranges associated with a lower biological age. Importantly, a number of markers that are modifiable with lifestyle changes were found to have a significant effect on biological age, including fasting blood glucose, lipids, and markers of red blood cell production. Conclusions: The combination of individualised outputs with target ranges could provide the ability to personalise interventions or recommendations based on an individual’s biochemistry and resulting predicted age. This would allow for the investigation of interventions designed to improve health and longevity in a targeted manner, many of which could be rooted in targeted lifestyle modifications.
Emulating network applications with a software-defined networking architecture

Current network architectures are ill-suited to meet today’s enterprise and academic requirements. The problem lies in the complexity needed to control and manage the network. This complexity stems from the strong coupling between the control and data planes. A novel network paradigm, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), was proposed to alleviate this problem. The main idea is to decouple the control and data planes, allowing the network to be programmatically controlled. A key entity in SDN architectures is the controller. This logically centralized entity acts as a network operating system, providing applications with a uniform and centralized programming interface to the underlying network. In this Thesis we will develop an application that performs server load balancing in a Software-Defined Network. Today’s load balancers are high-priced devices that have limited customizability. Furthermore, they can only balance load between the servers, and are forced to use the path the network provides. In an SDN architecture, performing server load balancing does not require these expensive and inflexible devices. A low-cost load balancing solution can be designed, further enhanced with the ability to schedule load not only between servers, but also between paths. In addition, the centralized network control permitted in SDN allows the collection of updated link information to be used by the same logically centralized entity that makes forwarding decisions, which permits dynamic scheduling algorithms to decide on a best path for network traffic. We will show that such a solution outperforms ones which are oblivious to the path the traffic takes.