bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Systematic Quantification of Stabilizing Effects of Subtalar Joint Soft-Tissue Constraints in a Novel Cadaveric Model
Authors: Pellegrini Manuel J. , Glisson Richard R. , Wurm Markus , Ousema Paul H. , Romash Michael M. , Nunley James A. , Easley Mark E.
Published: May 2016

Background:

Distinguishing between ankle instability and subtalar joint instability is challenging because the contributions of the subtalar joint’s soft-tissue constraints are poorly understood. This study quantified the effects on joint stability of systematic sectioning of these constraints followed by application of torsional and drawer loads simulating a manual clinical examination.

Methods:

Subtalar joint motion in response to carefully controlled inversion, eversion, internal rotation, and external rotation moments and multidirectional drawer forces was quantified in fresh-frozen cadaver limbs. Sequential measurements were obtained under axial load approximating a non-weight-bearing clinical setting with the foot in neutral, 10° of dorsiflexion, and 10° and 20° of plantar flexion. The contributions of the components of the inferior extensor retinaculum were documented after incremental sectioning. The calcaneofibular, cervical, and interosseous talocalcaneal ligaments were then sectioned sequentially, in two different orders, to produce five different ligament-insufficiency scenarios.

Results:

Incremental detachment of the components of the inferior extensor retinaculum had no effect on subtalar motion independent of foot position. Regardless of the subsequent ligament-sectioning order, significant motion increases relative to the intact condition occurred only after transection of the calcaneofibular ligament. Sectioning of this ligament produced increased inversion and external rotation, which was most evident with the foot dorsiflexed.

Conclusions:

Calcaneofibular ligament disruption results in increases in subtalar inversion and external rotation that might be detectable during a manual examination. Insufficiency of other subtalar joint constraints may result in motion increases that are too subtle to be perceptible.

Clinical Relevance:

If calcaneofibular ligament insufficiency is established, its reconstruction or repair should receive priority over that of other ankle or subtalar periarticular soft-tissue structures.
Seismic Velocity Prediction in Shallow (<30 m) Partially Saturated, Unconsolidated Sediments Using Effective Medium Theory
Authors: Shen Jie , Crane James M. , Lorenzo Juan M , White Chris D
Published: May 2016

Seismic velocity models of the near-surface (<30 m) better explain seismic velocities when all elements of total effective stress are considered, especially in materials with large cohesive and soil suction stress such as clays. Traditional constitutive elastic models that predict velocities in granular materials simplify the effect of total effective stress by equating it to net overburden stress, while excluding interparticle stresses and soil suction stress. A new proposed methodology calculates elastic moduli of granular matrices in near-surface environments by incorporating an updated definition of total effective stress into Hertz-Mindlin theory and calculates the elastic moduli of granular materials by extending Biot-Gassmann theory to include pressure effects induced by water saturation changes and cohesion. At shallow depths, when water saturation increases, theoretically calculated seismic velocities decrease in clay and increase in sand because interparticle stresses suppress the Biot-Gassmann effect. For standard sand and clay properties, net overburden stress becomes more influential than interparticle stresses at depths greater than 10 cm in sand and 100 m in clay. Pore pressure in the new model also incorporates the effect of layer thickness and pore size variation. Traditional calculation of pore pressure assumes a constant pore size medium, but may lead to an under- or overestimation of velocity by up to 20%. In clays, the variation of seismic velocity with water saturation is almost double the range predicted when only net overburden stress is considered to influence stress at the grain contacts. The proposed model predicts seismic velocities that compare well with measured field velocities from the literature.
Where is the Hot Rock and Where is the Ground Water – Using CSAMT to Map Beneath and Around Mount St. Helens
Authors: Wynn Jeff , Mosbrucker Adam , Pierce Herb , Spicer Kurt
Published: May 2016

We have observed several new features in recent controlled-source audio-frequency magnetotelluric (CSAMT) soundings on and around Mount St. Helens, Washington State, USA. We have identified the approximate location of a strong electrical conductor at the edges of and beneath the 2004–08 dome. We interpret this conductor to be hot brine at the hot-intrusive-cold-rock interface. This contact can be found within 50 meters of the receiver station on Spine 5, which extruded between April and July of 2005. We have also mapped separate regional and glacier-dome aquifers, which lie one atop the other, out to considerable distances from the volcano.
Mathematical Model of Human Forearm Based Muscle Fiber Tissues’ Anisotropic Characteristics
Authors: Qin Yu-Ping , Zhang Shuang , Liu Yi-he
Published: May 2016

On the basis of human muscle fiber tissues' characteristics, it is first proposed to establish the analytical model of galvanic coupling intra-body communication channel. In this model, the parallel and the transverse electrical characteristics of muscular tissue are fully considered, and the model accurately presents the transmission mechanism of galvanic coupling intra-body communication signals in the channel.
Aspirations identitaires, complexité institutionnelle et légitimité
Authors: Malinovskyte Miglé , Mothe Caroline , Rüling Charles-Clemens
Published: May 2016

Le processus de concrétisation d’une aspiration identitaire dans les environnements complexes restant largement méconnu, les auteurs étudient ici le rôle de la légitimité dans ledit processus. Cette recherche s’appuie sur une étude de cas comparative de trois centres de culture scientifique, technologique et industrielle (CCSTI) qui partagent une aspiration commune à devenir des intermédiaires de l’innovation au sein de leurs territoires. Les résultats montrent que la construction d’une nouvelle identité organisationnelle oblige ces organisations à s’engager dans des activités de légitimation envers leurs parties prenantes. Ils permettent de mieux comprendre la manière dont les organisations gèrent la complexité institutionnelle.
Quand une innovation sociale produit de l’innovation responsable
Authors: Van der Yeught Corinne , Bon Véronique
Published: May 2016

Cet article examine comment une démarche expérimentale initiée par une organisation de l’économie sociale et solidaire stimule les capacités d’innovation responsable de petites organisations artisanales et touristiques mises en réseau dans le Sud de la France en développant leur capital social et en favorisant les apprentissages grâce à diverses expérimentations. Fondée sur une étude de cas longitudinale avec design enchâssé, la recherche opérationnalise le concept de capacités dynamiques afin de révéler les processus à l’origine des innovations responsables observées.
L’apprentissage intergénérationnel
Authors: Shimada Sakura , Dameron Stéphanie
Published: May 2016

Cet article propose de revisiter les pratiques d’apprentissage intergénérationnel en situation, suivant le concept de génération organisationnelle et la perspective située duba. À travers la comparaison de quatorze cas d’apprentissage intergénérationnel en France et au Japon, les auteurs identifient les freins et les leviers dans la genèse, la structuration et la dynamique dubaintergénérationnel. Les rôles de l’identification commune des générations et de leurs émotions, ainsi que de l’appropriation du projet stratégique par les générations sont mis en avant.
The Peoples of Northern Russia Through the Eyes of Russian Writer and Ethnographer S. V. Maksimov
Authors: Gramatchikova Natalya
Published: May 2016

Mid-nineteenth-century Russian ethnography used fiction, artistry
and education to enlighten the masses. Maksimov’s One Year in the
North became one of the first examples of this new style of ethnography.
Maksimov constructs ‘cultural masks’ regarding northern people
(Samoyeds, Lapps, Karels, Zyrians). His impressions are developed
out of long traditions and personal characterisations, such as: ‘little
brothers’, blacksmiths, tricksters, ‘friends of deer and dogs’. The most
interesting positions on his ‘evolutionary ladder’ are the first and the
last, which belong to the Samoyeds and the Zyrians. Samoyeds find
themselves partly outside the human space, but they are most diverse
in the aspect of artistry. Zyrians, on the other hand, constitute a concern
to their well-being. Maksimov’s biases are typical for this period
of ethnographic development. Although Maksimov appreciates the
spoken word, his colonial discourse replaced it by repulsion for Finno-
Ugric languages. Artistry in the text of ‘ethnographic fiction’ enriches
scientific discourse.
Re-enacting Historical Slavic Rites in Contemporary Poland
Authors: Baraniecka-Olszewska Kamila
Published: May 2016

The article aims to show how ethnographic data concerning religious
rites, both Catholic and pagan, circulate in culture and thus
become a kind of historical source for re-enacting other, invented
religious rites. In the example of the Rękawka fair in Cracow, it is
demonstrated how religious content present in nineteenth-century
ethnographic descriptions, originally ascribed to pre-Christian paganism
but incorporated into a Catholic fair, was separated from it and
used in recreating and performing a neopagan rite. Investigating an
Early Middle Ages re-enactment movement, the author focuses on
the process of transforming ethnographic data into historical ones.
Analysing the problem of authenticity of such sources, she points
out the particularities of achieving authenticity in a re-enactment
movement: to some, the contemporary Rękawka fair remains only a
kind of historical re-enactment, while according to others it is a true
neopagan rite.
Forcing Johnny to login safely
Authors: Herzberg Amir , Margulies Ronen
Published: May 2016

We present the results of the first long-term user study of site-based login mechanisms which force and train users to login safely. We found that interactive site-identifying images received 70% detection rates, which is significantly better than the results received by the typical login ceremony and with passive defense indicators [in: CHI'06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, 2006, pp. 601–610; Computers & Security 28(1,2) (2009), 63–71; in: SP'07: Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, 2007, pp. 51–65]. We also found that combining login bookmarks with interactive images and ‘non-working’ buttons/links achieved the best detection rates (82%) and overall resistance rates (93%).

We also present WAPP (Web Application Phishing-Protection), an effective server-side solution which combines the login bookmark and the interactive custom image indicators. WAPP provides two-factor and two-sided authentication.
Supporting concurrency and multiple indexes in private access to outsourced data
Authors: De Capitani di Vimercati Sabrina , Foresti Sara , Paraboschi Stefano , Pelosi Gerardo , Samarati Pierangela
Published: May 2016

Data outsourcing has recently emerged as a successful solution allowing individuals and organizations to delegate data and service management to external third parties. A major challenge in the data outsourcing scenario is how to guarantee proper privacy protection against the external server. Recent promising approaches rely on the organization of data in indexing structures that use encryption and the dynamic allocation of encrypted data to physical blocks for destroying the otherwise static relationship between data and the blocks in which they are stored. However, dynamic data allocation implies the need to re-write blocks at every read access, thus requesting exclusive locks that can affect concurrency. Also, these solutions only support search conditions on the values of the attribute used for building the indexing structure.

In this paper, we present an approach that overcomes such limitations by extending the recently proposed shuffle index structure with support for concurrency and multiple indexes. Support for concurrency relies on the use of several differential versions of the data index that are periodically reconciled and applied to the main data structure. Support for multiple indexes relies on the definition of secondary shuffle indexes that are then combined with the primary index in a single data structure whose content and allocation is unintelligible to the server. We show how using such differential versions and combined index structure guarantees privacy, provides support for concurrent accesses and multiple search conditions, and considerably increases the performance of the system and the applicability of the proposed solution.
Formal verification of security properties in trust management policy
Authors: Niu Jianwei , Reith Mark , Winsborough William H.
Published: May 2016

Trust management is a scalable form of access control that relies heavily on delegation. Different parts of the policy are under the control of different principals in the system. While these two characteristics may be necessary in large or decentralized systems, they make it difficult to anticipate how policy changes made by others will affect whether ones own security objectives are met. Automated analysis tools are needed for assessing this question. The article develops techniques that support the development of tools to solve many analysis problem instances. When an access control policy fails to satisfy desired security objectives, the tools provide information about how and why the failure occurs. Such information can assist policy authors design appropriate policies. The approach to performing the analysis is based on model checking. To assist in making the approach effective, a collection of reduction techniques is introduced. We prove the correctness of these reductions and empirically evaluate their effectiveness. While the class of analysis problem instances we examine is generally intractable, we find that our reduction techniques are often able to reduce some problem instances into a form that can be automatically verified.
Cost effective management frameworks for intrusion detection systems
Authors: Iheagwara Charles , Blyth Andrew , Singhal Mukesh
Published: May 2016

This paper discusses the financial benefit of intrusion detection systems (IDS) deployment techniques and addresses the problems of bridging the gap between technical security solutions and the business need for it. This is an area of interest to both the research and the business community; most IDSes balance host and network monitoring, but the decision about how to adjust usage of each technique tends to be made in a rather ad-hoc way, or based upon effectiveness of detection only without regard to cost of technique. In practice, selections based on how well a strategy helps a company to perform are preferable and methodologies supporting a selection process of this type will assist an Information Technology officer to explain security mechanism selections more effectively to CEOs. In this context, the approach we propose could be applied when choosing one intrusion detection system over another based on which has a better or higher return on investment for the company.

Through a case study, we illustrate the benefits of a better IDS management that leads to a positive Return on Investment (ROI) for IDS deployment. We conceive strategies and approaches to support effective decision-making about which techniques are appropriate for the cost effective management of the IDS in a given environment. It is our intent that this research will serve as a foundation for the formal description of cost structures, analysis, and selection of effective implementation approaches to support the management of IDS deployments.
An approach to cooperative updates of XML documents in distributed systems
Authors: Bertino E. , Ferrari E. , Mella G.
Published: May 2016

Protection and secure exchange of Web documents is becoming a crucial need for many Internet-based applications. Securing Web documents entail addressing two main issues: confidentiality and integrity. Ensuring document confidentiality means that document contents can only be disclosed to subjects authorized according to specified security policies, whereas by document integrity we mean that the document contents are correct with respect to a given application domain and that the document contents are modified only by authorized subjects. While the problem of document confidentiality has been widely investigated in the literature, the problem of how to ensure that a document, when moving among different parties, is modified only according to the stated policies still lacks comprehensive solutions. In this paper we present a solution to this problem by proposing a model for specifying update policies, and an infrastructure supporting the specification and enforcement of these policies in a distributed and cooperative environment, in which subjects in different organizational roles can modify possibly different portions of the same document. The key aspect of our proposal is that, by using a combination of hash functions and digital signature techniques, we create a distributed environment that enables subjects, in most cases, to verify, upon receiving a document, whether the update operations performed on the document up to that point are correct with respect to the update policies, without interacting with the document server. Our approach is particularly suited for environments, such as mobile systems, pervasive systems, decentralized workflows, and peer-to-peer systems.
An efficient high quality random number generator for multi-programmed systems
Authors: Zúquete André
Published: May 2016

This document presents an efficient, high quality random number generator for multi-programmed environments, in particular for UNIX/Linux and Windows systems. The algorithm uses a system's notion of the time, given by a high-precision real-time counter, to obtain random bits, and a combination of system calls to reduce the correlation between consecutive random bits. The combination of system calls introduces variable and unpredictable real-time gaps in the execution of the generator. We present a rationale for such variation and unpredictability, and we show that in fact they exist even when the generator runs in an adverse scenario, i.e., a lightly loaded system. We also show how the generator resists several attacks attempting to guess or control the values it produces. The quality of the generator is evaluated both in terms of its performance and the randomness of the byte sequences it produces. Comparing against other similar generators, CryptoLib and librand, our generator produces equally good random byte sequences, but its performance increases with the speed of the processor, while the performance of CryptoLib and librand is rather constant for each operating system, independently of the processor were it runs.
A decision procedure for the existence of a rank function
Authors: Heather James , Schneider Steve
Published: May 2016

Schneider's work on rank functions [IEEE TSE 24(9) (1998)] provides a formal approach to verification of certain properties of a security protocol. However, he illustrates the approach only with a protocol running on a small network; and no help is given with the somewhat hit-and-miss process of finding the rank function that underpins the central theorem.

In this paper, we develop the theory to allow for an arbitrarily large network, and give a clearly defined decision procedure by which one may either construct a rank function, proving correctness of the protocol, or show that no rank function exists.

We briefly discuss the implications of the absence of a rank function, and the open question of completeness of the rank function theorem.
Information flow security in dynamic contexts
Authors: Focardi Riccardo , Rossi Sabina
Published: May 2016

We study information flow security in the setting of mobile agents. We propose a sufficient condition to security named Persistent_BNDC. A process is Persistent_BNDC when every of its reachable states satisfies a basic Non-Interference property called BNDC. By imposing that security persists during process execution, one is guaranteed that every potential migration is performed in a stable, secure state. We define a suitable bisimulation-based equivalence relation among processes, that allows us to express the new property as a single equivalence check, thus avoiding the universal quantifications over all the reachable states (required by Persistent_BNDC) and over all the possible hostile environments (implicit in the basic Non-Interference property BNDC). We prove that Persistent_BNDC is a sufficient condition to the security of mobile agents by (i) giving a sound and complete characterization of Persistent_BNDC in terms of dynamic contexts, i.e., execution contexts that can non-deterministically change at run-time, abstractly modelling arbitrary migrations; (ii) showing that Persistent_BNDC implies information flow security when agent mobility is explicitly expressed in the calculus.
Language based policy analysis in a SPKI Trust Management System
Authors: Eamani Arun K. , Sistla A. Prasad
Published: May 2016

SPKI/SDSI is a standard for issuing authorization and name certificates. SPKI/SDSI can be used to implement a Trust Management System, where the policy for resource access is distributively specified by multiple trusted entities. Agents in the system need a formal mechanism for understanding the current state of policy. We present a first order temporal logic, called FTPL for specifying properties of a given SPKI/SDSI policy state. We also present algorithms to check if a SPKI/SDSI policy state satisfies a property specified in FTPL.
Verifying privacy-type properties of electronic voting protocols
Authors: Delaune Stéphanie , Kremer Steve , Ryan Mark
Published: May 2016

Electronic voting promises the possibility of a convenient, efficient and secure facility for recording and tallying votes in an election. Recently highlighted inadequacies of implemented systems have demonstrated the importance of formally verifying the underlying voting protocols. We study three privacy-type properties of electronic voting protocols: in increasing order of strength, they are vote-privacy, receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance.

We use the applied pi calculus, a formalism well adapted to modelling such protocols, which has the advantages of being based on well-understood concepts. The privacy-type properties are expressed using observational equivalence and we show in accordance with intuition that coercion-resistance implies receipt-freeness, which implies vote-privacy.

We illustrate our definitions on three electronic voting protocols from the literature. Ideally, these three properties should hold even if the election officials are corrupt. However, protocols that were designed to satisfy receipt-freeness or coercion-resistance may not do so in the presence of corrupt officials. Our model and definitions allow us to specify and easily change which authorities are supposed to be trustworthy.
Leak-free mediated group signatures
Authors: Ding Xuhua , Tsudik Gene , Xu Shouhuai
Published: May 2016

Group signatures are a useful cryptographic construct for privacy-preserving non-repudiable authentication, and there have been many group signature schemes. In this paper, we introduce a variant of group signatures that offers two new security properties called leak-freedom and immediate-revocation. Intuitively, the former ensures that an insider (i.e., an authorized but malicious signer) be unable to convince an outsider (e.g., a signature receiver) that she indeed signed a certain message; whereas the latter ensures that the authorization for a user to issue group signatures can be immediately revoked whenever the need arises (temporarily or permanently). These properties are not offered in existing group signature schemes, nor captured by their security definitions. However, these properties might be crucial to a large class of enterprise-centric applications because they are desirable from the perspective of the enterprises who adopt group signatures or are the group signatures liability-holders (i.e., will be held accountable for the consequences of group signatures). In addition to introducing these new security properties, we present a scheme that possesses both traditional and these newly introduced properties. Our scheme is constructed using an architectural approach where a mediation server is exploited to trade on-line communications for the extra security properties, which explains why the resulting scheme is called “leak-free mediated group signatures”.
Secure attribute-based systems
Authors: Pirretti Matthew , Traynor Patrick , McDaniel Patrick , Waters Brent
Published: May 2016

Attributes define, classify, or annotate the datum to which they are assigned. However, traditional attribute architectures and cryptosystems are ill-equipped to provide security in the face of diverse access requirements and environments. In this paper, we introduce a novel secure information management architecture based on emerging attribute-based encryption (ABE) primitives. A policy system that meets the needs of complex policies is defined and illustrated. Based on the needs of those policies, we propose cryptographic optimizations that vastly improve enforcement efficiency. We further explore the use of such policies in two proposed applications: a HIPAA compliant distributed file system and a social network. A performance analysis and characterization of ABE primitives demonstrates the ability to reduce cryptographic costs by as much as 98% over previously proposed constructions. Through this, we demonstrate that our attribute system is an efficient solution for securely managing information in large, loosely-coupled, distributed systems.
Finding the PKI needles in the Internet haystack
Authors: Pala Massimiliano , Smith Sean W.
Published: May 2016

Public key cryptography can uniquely enable trust within distributed settings. Employing it usually requires deploying a set of tools and services collectively known as a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). PKIs have become a central asset for many organizations, due to distributed IT and users. Even though the usage of PKIs in closed and controlled environments is quite common, interoperability and usability problems arise when shifting to a broader, open environment. To make an effective trust judgment about a public key certificate, a PKI user needs more than just knowledge of that certificate: she also needs to be able to locate critical parameters such as the certificate repositories and certificate validation servers relevant to that certificate – and all the others the trust path she builds for it. Surprisingly, locating these resources and services remains a largely unsolved problem in real-world X.509 PKI deployment. This issue impacts especially on the usability of this technology and the interoperability of PKIs in open environments such as the Internet.

In this paper, we present the design and prototype of a new and flexible solution for automatic discovery of the services and data repositories made available by a Certificate Service Provider (CSP). This contribution will take real-world PKI one step closer to enhancing usability of digital certificates and interoperability between PKIs.
Automatic analysis of malware behavior using machine learning
Authors: Rieck Konrad , Trinius Philipp , Willems Carsten , Holz Thorsten
Published: May 2016

Malicious software – so called malware – poses a major threat to the security of computer systems. The amount and diversity of its variants render classic security defenses ineffective, such that millions of hosts in the Internet are infected with malware in the form of computer viruses, Internet worms and Trojan horses. While obfuscation and polymorphism employed by malware largely impede detection at file level, the dynamic analysis of malware binaries during run-time provides an instrument for characterizing and defending against the threat of malicious software.

In this article, we propose a framework for the automatic analysis of malware behavior using machine learning. The framework allows for automatically identifying novel classes of malware with similar behavior (clustering) and assigning unknown malware to these discovered classes (classification). Based on both, clustering and classification, we propose an incremental approach for behavior-based analysis, capable of processing the behavior of thousands of malware binaries on a daily basis. The incremental analysis significantly reduces the run-time overhead of current analysis methods, while providing accurate discovery and discrimination of novel malware variants.
A survey of system security in contactless electronic passports
Authors: Sinha Anshuman
Published: May 2016

A traditional paper-based passport contains a Machine-Readable Zone (MRZ) and a Visual Inspection Zone (VIZ). The MRZ has two lines of the holder's personal data, some document data, and verification characters encoded using the Optical Character Recognition font B (OCR-B), described in the appendix. The encoded data includes the holder's name, date of birth, and other identifying information for the holder or the document. The VIZ contains the holder's photo and signature, usually on the data page. However, the MRZ and VIZ can be easily duplicated with normal document reproduction technology to produce a fake passport which can pass traditional verification. Neither of these features actively verify the holder's identity; nor do they bind the holder's identity to the document. A passport also contains pages for stamps of visas and of country entry and exit dates, which can be easily altered to produce fake permissions and travel records. The electronic passport, supporting authentication using secure credentials on a tamper-resistant chip, is an attempt to improve on the security of the paper-based passport at minimum cost. This paper surveys the security mechanisms built into the first-generation of authentication mechanisms and compares them with second-generation passports. It analyzes and describes the cryptographic protocols used in Basic Access Control (BAC) and Extended Access Control (EAC).
A system for generating and injecting indistinguishable network decoys
Authors: Bowen Brian M. , Kemerlis Vasileios P. , Prabhu Pratap , Keromytis Angelos D. , Stolfo Salvatore J.
Published: May 2016

We propose a novel trap-based architecture for detecting passive, “silent”, attackers who are eavesdropping on enterprise networks. Motivated by the increasing number of incidents where attackers sniff the local network for interesting information, such as credit card numbers, account credentials, and passwords, we introduce a methodology for building a trap-based network that is designed to maximize the realism of bait-laced traffic. Our proposal relies on a “record, modify, replay” paradigm that can be easily adapted to different networked environments. The primary contributions of our architecture are the ease of automatically injecting large amounts of believable bait, and the integration of different detection mechanisms in the back-end. We demonstrate our methodology in a prototype platform that uses our decoy injection API to dynamically create and dispense network traps on a subset of our campus wireless network. Our network traps consist of several types of monitored passwords, authentication cookies, credit cards and documents containing beacons to alarm when opened. The efficacy of our decoys against a model attack program is also discussed, along with results obtained from experiments in the field. In addition, we present a user study that demonstrates the believability of our decoy traffic, and finally, we provide experimental results to show that our solution causes only negligible interference to ordinary users.
A semantic-based transaction processing model for multilevel transactions
Authors: Ray Indrakshi , Ammann Paul , Jajodia Sushil
Published: May 2016

Multilevel transactions have been proposed for multilevel secure databases; in contrast to most proposals, such transactions allow users to read and write across multiple security levels. The security requirement that no high level operation influence a low level operation often conflicts with the atomicity requirement of the standard transaction processing model. In particular, others have shown that no concurrency control algorithm based on the standard transaction processing model can guarantee both atomicity and security. This conflict motivates us to propose an alternative semantic-based transaction processing model for multilevel transactions. Our model uses the semantics of the application to analyze an application and reason about its behavior. Our notion of correctness is based on semantic correctness instead of serializability as in the standard transaction processing model. Semantic correctness ensures that database consistency is maintained, transactions output consistent data, and all partially executed transactions complete. We show how an example application can be analyzed to assure semantic correctness and how this analysis can be automated. We also propose a simple timestamp-based multiversion concurrency control algorithm for transaction processing on a kernelized architecture. The advantages of our model over the standard transaction processing model are that atomicity can be assessed, and for some applications ensured via off line analysis, more concurrency is achieved, lesser synchronization between security levels is required, and a larger class of multilevel transactions can be processed.
Micropropagation of an important medicinal herb Eclipta alba (L.) Hassk.
Authors: Yesmin S , Hashem A , Islam MS
Published: May 2016

Nodal segments from naturally grown Eclipta alba (L.) Hassk.were used as explants for organogenesis. Multiple shoots were obtained from the explants cultured on MS medium supplemented with various concentrations of BAP and Kn alone or in combination with NAA and IAA. Maximum number of multiple shoots (18.40±0.67) were induced on MS medium supplemented with 1.0 mg/l BAP and 0.1mg/NAA. In vitro raised shoots were cultured onto half and full strength MS medium supplemented with different concentration of IBA, IAA and NAA. The best root induction medium was found to be half strength MS containing 0.1 mg/l IBA where 96% shoots rooted. Regenerated plantlets grew normally without showing any morphological variation and flowered after 45 days of transplantation.Jahangirnagar University J. Biol. Sci. 4(1): 61-69, 2015 (June)
Ethnomedicinal value, phytochemical composition and bioactivity of Butea monosperma (Lam.) Taub.
Authors: Ahmed Fakhruddin Ali , Kabir Humayun
Published: May 2016

Ethnomedicinal study on Butea monosperma (Lam.) Taub. revealed that native people of Netrokona district extensively use flower, bark and leaves of the plant to treat different kinds of diseases. People of the studied area used the plant to treat goiter, diabetes, painful menstruation, body swellings, intestinal worms, urinary stone, leucorrhoea and chronic fever. Application of root powder mixed with honey as an antidote for snake bite was recorded for the first time. Phytochemical screening of the methanolic extracts of flowers, leaves and stem of this plant showed the presence of carbohydrate, flavonoid, glycosides, saponins, terpenoids and steroids. Through qualitative assessment, flower was found to be rich in flavonoids compared to leaf and stem. Leaf extract of B. monosperma showed relatively higher cytotoxicity than flower and stem extracts. The highest free radical scavenging activity was observed in flower sample (73.49%) and the lowest in leaf sample (48.17%). The results of the present study may be a proof of a scientific basis for the use of B. monosperma in traditional medicine.Jahangirnagar University J. Biol. Sci. 4(2): 19-29, 2015 (December)
Impact of Pre-Anthesis Water Deficit on Yield and Yield Components in Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) Plants Grown under Controlled Conditions
Authors: Al-Ajlouni Zakaria , Al-Abdallat Ayed , Al-Ghzawi Abdul , Ayad Jamal , Abu Elenein Jamal , Al-Quraan Nisreen , Baenziger P.
Published: May 2016

Drought at pre-anthesis stages can influence barley growth and results in yield losses. Therefore, it is important to understand how drought at pre-anthesis can affect different traits associated with yield reduction in barley. The objective of this study was to understand the relevance of the genetic background of major flowering time genes in barley plants subjected to pre-anthesis drought and its impact on yield and yield components. A glasshouse experiment using a Randomized Complete Block Design was conducted to investigate the effect of drought and its timing on yield and yield components on eleven barley genotypes, which were selected to represent genetic diversity of major flowering time genes (PPDH1, PPDH2, HvVrn1, HvVrn2 and HvVrn3). Barley plants were exposed to three water regimes, non-stressed and stressed, which was applied at two pre-anthesis growth stages, tillering (SS) and stem elongation (SE). Results identified differences among genotypes in all measured traits. Grain yield, grain number and "thousand kernel weight" were reduced in all genotypes due to drought, irrespective of the growth stage. Early flowering genotypes had better performance as reflected in higher yield compared with late flowering genotypes. Results verified the fundamental importance of early flowering to improve productivity in response to pre-anthesis drought. The results of this study can help in selecting barley lines for future breeding purposes with improved resilience to drought conditions in Mediterranean environments.
Adaptive Protection Scheme for a Distribution System Considering Grid-Connected and Islanded Modes of Operation
Authors: Ates Yavuz , Boynuegri Ali , Uzunoglu Mehmet , Nadar Abdullah , Yumurtacı Recep , Erdinc Ozan , Paterakis Nikolaos , Catalão João
Published: May 2016

The renewable energy-based distributed generation (DG) implementation in power systems has been an active research area during the last few decades due to several environmental, economic and political factors. Although the integration of DG offers many advantages, several concerns, including protection schemes in systems with the possibility of bi-directional power flow, are raised. Thus, new protection schemes are strongly required in power systems with a significant presence of DG. In this study, an adaptive protection strategy for a distribution system with DG integration is proposed. The proposed strategy considers both grid-connected and islanded operating modes, while the adaptive operation of the protection is dynamically realized considering the availability of DG power production (related to faults or meteorological conditions) in each time step. Besides, the modular structure and fast response of the proposed strategy is validated via simulations conducted on the IEEE 13-node test system.
The Crisis in the Humanities—What Would Shakespeare do?
Authors: Yachnin Paul
Published: May 2016

In this essay, I turn to Shakespeare for advice about how to alleviate the crisis in the humanities. University faculty and PhD students develop what I’ve called a dispositional immobility, a disposition to do what they do only in an academic setting. I think humanities faculty and doctoral students can learn from Shakespeare a good deal about how to mobilize themselves and what they do as well as a lot about how to change the institution of the humanities, especially by following his practice of institution blending. Shakespeare, I will argue, can teach us how to move.
Applications of a Novel Clustering Approach Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization to Environmental Research in Public Health
Authors: Fogel Paul , Gaston-Mathé Yann , Hawkins Douglas , Fogel Fajwel , Luta George , Young S.
Published: May 2016

Often data can be represented as a matrix, e.g., observations as rows and variables as columns, or as a doubly classified contingency table. Researchers may be interested in clustering the observations, the variables, or both. If the data is non-negative, then Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) can be used to perform the clustering. By its nature, NMF-based clustering is focused on the large values. If the data is normalized by subtracting the row/column means, it becomes of mixed signs and the original NMF cannot be used. Our idea is to split and then concatenate the positive and negative parts of the matrix, after taking the absolute value of the negative elements. NMF applied to the concatenated data, which we call PosNegNMF, offers the advantages of the original NMF approach, while giving equal weight to large and small values. We use two public health datasets to illustrate the new method and compare it with alternative clustering methods, such as K-means and clustering methods based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) or Principal Component Analysis (PCA). With the exception of situations where a reasonably accurate factorization can be achieved using the first SVD component, we recommend that the epidemiologists and environmental scientists use the new method to obtain clusters with improved quality and interpretability.
Metal Complexes of New Bioactive Pyrazolone Phenylhydrazones; Crystal Structure of 4-Acetyl-3-methyl-1-phenyl-2-pyrazoline-5-one phenylhydrazone Ampp-Ph
Authors: Idemudia Omoruyi , Sadimenko Alexander , Hosten Eric
Published: May 2016

The condensation reaction of phenylhydrazine and dinitrophenylhydrazine with 4-acetyl and 4-benzoyl pyrazolone precipitated air-stable acetyldinitrophenylhydrazone Ampp-Dh, benzoylphenylhydrazone Bmpp-Ph and benzoyldinitrophenylhydrazone Bmpp-Dh in their keto imine form; a study inspired by the burning interest for the development of new bioactive materials with novel properties that may become alternative therapeutic agents. Elemental analysis, FTIR, 1H, and 13C NMR, and mass spectroscopy have been used to justify their proposed chemical structures, which were in agreement with the single crystal structure of Bmpp-Dh earlier reported according to X-ray crystallography. The single crystal structure of 4-acetyl-3-methyl-1-phenyl--pyrazoline-5-one phenylhydrazone Ampp-Ph, which crystallizes in a triclinic crystal system with a P-1 (No. 2) space group is presented. Octahedral Mn(II), Ni(II), Co(II), and Cu(II) complexes of these respective ligands with two molecules each of the bidentate Schiff base, coordinating to the metal ion through the azomethine nitrogen C=N and the keto oxygen C=O, which were afforded by the reaction of aqueous solutions of the corresponding metal salts with the ligands are also reported. Their identity and proposed structures were according to elemental analysis, FTIR spectroscopy, UV-VIS spectrophotometry (electronic spectra) and Bohr magnetic moments, as well as thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) results. A look at the antibacterial and antioxidant activities of synthesized compounds using the methods of the disc diffusion against some selected bacterial isolates and 1,1-diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazil (DPPH) respectively, showed biological activities in relation to employed standard medicinal drugs.
DNA Damage: A Main Determinant of Vascular Aging
Authors: Bautista-Niño Paula , Portilla-Fernandez Eliana , Vaughan Douglas , Danser A. , Roks Anton
Published: May 2016

Vascular aging plays a central role in health problems and mortality in older people. Apart from the impact of several classical cardiovascular risk factors on the vasculature, chronological aging remains the single most important determinant of cardiovascular problems. The causative mechanisms by which chronological aging mediates its impact, independently from classical risk factors, remain to be elucidated. In recent years evidence has accumulated that unrepaired DNA damage may play an important role. Observations in animal models and in humans indicate that under conditions during which DNA damage accumulates in an accelerated rate, functional decline of the vasculature takes place in a similar but more rapid or more exaggerated way than occurs in the absence of such conditions. Also epidemiological studies suggest a relationship between DNA maintenance and age-related cardiovascular disease. Accordingly, mouse models of defective DNA repair are means to study the mechanisms involved in biological aging of the vasculature. We here review the evidence of the role of DNA damage in vascular aging, and present mechanisms by which genomic instability interferes with regulation of the vascular tone. In addition, we present potential remedies against vascular aging induced by genomic instability. Central to this review is the role of diverse types of DNA damage (telomeric, non-telomeric and mitochondrial), of cellular changes (apoptosis, senescence, autophagy), mediators of senescence and cell growth (plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors, senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP)/senescence-messaging secretome (SMS), insulin and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) signaling), the adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK)-mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR)-nuclear factor kappa B (NFκB) axis, reactive oxygen species (ROS) vs. endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS)-cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) signaling, phosphodiesterase (PDE) 1 and 5, transcription factor NF-E2-related factor-2 (Nrf2), and diet restriction.
Overview of MicroRNAs in Cardiac Hypertrophy, Fibrosis, and Apoptosis
Authors: Wang Juan , Liew Oi , Richards Arthur , Chen Yei-Tsung
Published: May 2016

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs that play essential roles in modulating the gene expression in almost all biological events. In the past decade, the involvement of miRNAs in various cardiovascular disorders has been explored in numerous in vitro and in vivo studies. In this paper, studies focused upon the discovery of miRNAs, their target genes, and functionality are reviewed. The selected miRNAs discussed herein have regulatory effects on target gene expression as demonstrated by miRNA/3′ end untranslated region (3′UTR) interaction assay and/or gain/loss-of-function approaches. The listed miRNA entities are categorized according to the biological relevance of their target genes in relation to three cardiovascular pathologies, namely cardiac hypertrophy, fibrosis, and apoptosis. Furthermore, comparison across 86 studies identified several candidate miRNAs that might be of particular importance in the ontogenesis of cardiovascular diseases as they modulate the expression of clusters of target genes involved in the progression of multiple adverse cardiovascular events. This review illustrates the involvement of miRNAs in diverse biological signaling pathways and provides an overview of current understanding of, and progress of research into, of the roles of miRNAs in cardiovascular health and disease.