No / The rapid shift and increase in remote access to organisation resources have led to a significant increase in the number of attack vectors and attack surfaces, which in turn has motivated the development of newer and more sophisticated cyber-attacks. Such attacks include Multi-Stage Attacks (MSAs). In MSAs, the attack is executed through several stages. Classifying malicious traffic into stages to get more information about the attack life-cycle becomes a challenge. This paper proposes a malicious traffic clustering approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). LDA is a topic modelling approach used in natural language processing to address similar problems. The proposed approach is unsupervised learning and therefore will be beneficial in scenarios where traffic data is not labeled and analysis needs to be performed. The proposed approach uncovers intrinsic contexts that relate to different categories of attack stages in MSAs. These are vital insights needed across different areas of cybersecurity teams like Incident Response (IR) within the Security Operations Center (SOC), the insights uncovered could have a positive impact in ensuring that attacks are detected at early stages in MSAs. Besides, for IR, these insights help to understand the attack behavioural patterns and lead to reduced time in recovery following an incident. The proposed approach is evaluated on a publicly available MSAs dataset. The performance results are promising as evidenced by over 99% accuracy in identified malicious traffic clusters.

No / Intermittent pneumatic compression (IPC) is a mechanical method of delivering compression to swollen limbs that can be used to treat venous leg ulcers and limb swelling due to lymphoedema. This review analyses the evidence for the effectiveness of IPC as a treatment for venous leg ulcers. OBJECTIVES: To determine whether IPC increases the healing of venous leg ulcers. To determine the effects of IPC on health related quality of life of venous leg ulcer patients. SEARCH STRATEGY: We searched the Cochrane Wounds Group Specialised Register (December 2007); the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) - The Cochrane Library Issue 4, 2007; Ovid MEDLINE - 2006 to November Week 2 2007; Ovid EMBASE - 2006 to 2007 Week 49 and Ovid CINAHL - 2006 to December Week 1 2007. SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised controlled studies either comparing IPC with control (sham IPC or no IPC) or comparisons between IPC treatment regimens, in venous ulcer management were included. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Data extraction and assessment of study quality were undertaken by one author and checked by a second. MAIN RESULTS: Seven randomised controlled trials (including 367 people in total) were identified. Only one trial reported both allocation concealment and blinded outcome assessment. In one trial (80 people) more ulcers healed with IPC than with dressings (62% vs 28%; p=0.002). Four trials compared IPC with compression against compression alone. The first of these trials (45 people) found increased ulcer healing with IPC plus compression than with compression alone (relative risk for healing 11.4, 95% Confidence Interval 1.6 to 82). The remaining three trials (122 people) found no evidence of a benefit for IPC plus compression compared with compression alone. One small trial (16 people) found no difference between IPC (without additional compression) and compression bandages alone. One trial compared different ways of delivering IPC (104 people) and found that rapid IPC healed more ulcers than slow IPC (86% vs 61%; log rank p=0.003). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: IPC may increase healing compared with no compression, but it is not clear whether it increases healing when added to treatment with bandages, or if it can be used instead of compression bandages. Rapid IPC was better than slow IPC in one trial. Further trials are required to determine whether IPC increases the healing of venous leg ulcers when used in modern practice where compression therapy is widely used.

As social interactions increasingly become exclusively online, there is a need for research on the role of identity and social identity in online platforms. Drawing on Symbolic Interactionist approaches to identity, namely Social Identity Theory and Identity Theory, as well as Signaling Theory, this study argues that actors will selectively use religious language to signal their credentials to an audience for the purpose of garnering prosocial behavior in the form of donations to their fundraising campaign. Using latent semantic analysis topic models to analyze the self-presentations of crowdsourcing campaigners on GoFundMe.com, this study found evidence for the presence of signaling to a religious identity online as well as a significant difference in the presentation of need for campaigns originating in areas with high reported religiosity compared to campaigns from areas of low religiosity. In comparison to other campaigns, campaigners engaging in religious signaling were significantly increasing their donations. I suggest that strategically chosen religious topics in online crowdfunding is an example of low-cost identity signaling and provides insight into how signaling happens online and the potential outcomes resulting from this cultural work.

Phishing is a social engineering attack to deceive and persuade people to divulge private information like usernames and passwords, account details (including bank account details), and social security numbers. Phishers typically utilize e-mail, chat, text messages, or social media. Despite the presence of automatic anti-phishing filters, phishing messages reach online users' inboxes. Understanding the influence of phishing techniques and individual differences on susceptibility and detection accuracy is an important step toward creating comprehensive behavioral and organizational anti-phishing awareness programs. This dissertation seeks to achieve a dual purpose in a series of three essays. Essay 1 seeks to explore the nature of phishing threats that including identifying attack intentions, and psychological and design techniques of phishing attacks. Essay 2 seeks to understand the relative influence of attack techniques and individual phishing experiential traits on people's phishing susceptibility. Essay 3 seeks to understand an individual's cognitive and affective differences that differentiate between an individual's phishing detection accuracy.

A tremendous amount of information is being shared every day on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. However, only a small portion of users provide their location information, which can be helpful in targeted advertising and many other services. Current methods in location estimation using social relationships consider social friendship as a simple binary relationship. However, social closeness between users and structure of friends have strong implications on geographic distances. In the first task, we introduce new measures to evaluate the social closeness between users and structure of friends. Then we propose models that use them for location estimation. Compared with the models which take the friend relation as a binary feature, social closeness can help identify which friend of a user is more important and friend structure can help to determine significance level of locations, thus improving the accuracy of the location estimation models. A confidence iteration method is further introduced to improve estimation accuracy and overcome the problem of scarce location information. We evaluate our methods on two different datasets, Twitter and Gowalla. The results show that our model can improve the estimation accuracy by 5% - 20% compared with state-of-the-art friend-based models. In the second task, we also propose a Local Event Discovery and Summarization (LEDS) framework to detect local events from Twitter. Many existing algorithms for event detection focus on larger-scale events and are not sensitive to smaller-scale local events. Most of the local events detected by these methods are major events like important sports, shows, or big natural disasters. In this work, we propose the LEDS framework to detect both bigger and smaller events. LEDS contains three key steps: 1) Detecting possible event related terms by monitoring abnormal distribution in different locations and times; 2) Clustering tweets based on their key terms, time, and location distribution; and 3) Extracting descriptions include time, location, and key sentences of local events from clusters. The model is evaluated on a real-world Twitter dataset with more than 60 million tweets. The analysis of Twitter data can help to predict or explain many real-world phenomena. The relationships among events in the real world can be reflected among the topics on social media. In the third task, we propose the concept of topic association and the associated mining algorithms. Topics with close temporal and spatial relationship may have direct or potential association in the real world. Our goal is to mine such topic associations and show their relationships in different time-region frames. We propose to use the concepts of participation ratio and participation index to measure the closeness among topics and propose a spatiotemporal index to calculate them efficiently. With the topic filtering and the topic combination, we further optimize the mining process and the mining results.

主題-評論結構(topic-comment)在主題顯著(topic prominent)的語言(如中文)扮演十分重要的角色,尤其是在描述第二語言學習者的中介語時特別重要．但是有關研究,對於中國學生在學習英文時產生的中介語,並沒有對主題-評論結構提供全面且確切的描述．本研究旨在探討中國學生學習英文時所產生的中介語之主題-評論結構, 運用三種測驗來引出中介語—文法判定測驗, 引導寫作測驗, 及翻譯測驗．受試者包含台灣區域位於台北的三所國中挑選的94位國二生,以國一期末考英文成績分為三組．此外,並於政大語視中心挑選14位以英語為母語的外籍生作為本研究的控制組．本研究探討的四種主題-評論結構是由中英文主題結構對比中所產生的, 分別為主題省略(topic drop), 主題移前(topicalization), 主題置左(left-dislocation), 及雙主詞結構(double-subject construction)．本研究所運用的中介語之理論架構是參考三種第二外語習得理論所發展出來的, 分別為第一語言影響(L1 influence), 普遍語法(universal grammar)的存在, 以及附屬集合理論(the Subset Principle)． 研究結果顯示, 第一語言轉換(L1 transfer)在所有程度的學生的中介語當中都十分普遍, 但是普遍語法只有在程度最高的學生的中介語較為明顯．因此本研究推論中介語系統內部運作過程包含三階段, 開始為第一語言轉換, 接著是第一語言轉換及普遍語法並存, 最後階段為普遍語法． / The role that the topic-comment structure plays in a topic prominent language such as Chinese is very important when it comes to SLA learners’ interlanguage. However, the related research has not provided a comprehensive framework in describing topic structures of Chinese EFL learners’ interlanguage. The purpose of this study is to analyze the topic structures in Chinese EFL learners’ interlanguage elicited by three tasks—the grammaticality judgment task, the guided writing task, and the translation task. The subjects include 94 junior high school students chosen from three separate schools in Taipei, Taiwan, and they were divided into three proficiency levels. In addition, 14 native speakers from the language center of NCCU served as the control group. This study investigated four topic structures—topic drop, topicalization, left-dislocation, and double-subject construction—which were determined by a comparative study of Chinese and English topic structures. The current theoretical framework of interlanguage operation is developed from three SLA perspectives—L1 influence, the existence of universal grammar (UG), and the subset principle. Results indicated that L1 transfer was prevalent in all proficiency levels but UG was only obvious in the most advanced level. It was thus inferred that the internal operation of interlanguage system should include three stages—first L1 transfer, then L1 transfer and UG, and finally UG.

At present, there is no cure for bone metastasis. The current goals in patient care are to palliate pain, prevent pathological bone fracture and increase the strength and function of bone, so as to extend the life expectancy and maintain a good quality of life. Bisphosphonate treatment is the currently standard therapy of bone metastasis and is commonly used by physicians; it alleviates the tumour-induced hypercalcemia in 90% of patients and reduces the metastatic bone pain in 50% of patients. Moreover, it also prevents the pathological fracture of the affected bones. However, while effective, bisphosphonate injections are very costly, though its oral formulation is less expensive it is also less efficacious, and causes gastrointestinal discomfort. Furthermore, prolonged use of bisphosphonate treatment may lead to certain adverse effects, including hypocalcemia. These factors will prohibit the longterm use of such medication as it can negatively affect the treatment outcome. / Based on enormous medical potentials illustrated by the aforementioned findings, BBYNG deserves wider clinical application, large-scale clinical study on its preventive effect against bone metastasis and detailed investigation of its mode(s) of action in the body. / Based on the above-described understanding of Chinese medicine and bone metastasis, supplementing the kidney and strengthening bone could be the basic principle for the treatment of bone metastasis using Chinese medicine. In view of this theory, and in addition to the clinical observation and a thorough search of the available literature, we selected relevant kidney-tonifying Chinese herbs, namely (Fructus Ligustri Lucidi), (Rhizoma Drynariae), (Herba Epimedii), (Psoralea Corylifolia) and wide-spectrum anticancer herbs (Herba Hedyotidis Diffusae) for the preparation of a combined formula--BBYNG. / Chinese medicine has long been used to treat cancers. Its advantages reside in its holistic properties, which bring palliative, corrective and convalescing functions against damage caused by radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery. These features position Chinese medicines as the adjuvant to orthodox cancer treatment. During the late stage of tumour development, when standard therapy is no longer effective, Chinese medicine plays a critical role as an integrated therapy. Searching for a safe, inexpensive and effective Chinese medicine preparation suitable for prolonged use as adjunct therapy in late cancer cases is of paramount importance. / Clinical results. Both Chinese medicine and Western medicine treated patients showed no significant change in their blood parameters or liver and kidney examinations before and after drug administration; Male subjects on BBYNG, their bone mass density remained stable after 6 months treatment and the subjects on OSTAC showed slightly decreased In females, subjects on BBYNG remained stable, but subjects on OSTAC slightly increased. / Clinical study. The study was designed as a randomized, parallel-group comparison between BBYNG formula and Bisphosphonate. The patients who meet the inclusion/exclusion criteria were randomly assigned to receive either BBYNG granules, which was prepared by a GMP manufacturer, or Clodronic acid. The treatment period was 6 months (24 weeks). For both groups, various clinical parameters such as body functions, blood examinations, bone density (BMD) assessment, X-ray examinations, pain intensity and quality of life were evaluated and compared. / Conclusions. (1) As an adjuvant to patients with bone metastases, BBYNG is effective in relieving the metastatic bone pain, improving the quality of life. (2) In the animal model, BBYNG reduced the metastatic bone damage, prolonged the survival and enhanced the T lymphocyte immunity in the tumour-bearing mice. (3) In vitro study on the breast and lung cancer cell lines showed that BYYNG could induce apoptosis and prevent tumour cell invasion. It suggests that BYYNG may restrict tumour growth and development, thus reducing the occurrence of bone metastasis. / In accordance with Chinese medicine, bone metastasis can be categorized into "bone tumour" "bone erosion" "bone wilting" "bone necrosis" and "bone impediment". The main cause of bone metastasis is twofold: cancer toxicity, and in Chinese medicine theory, the kidney governs the bone marrow, if the kidney is not functioning in balance, then the bone will become weak. Cancer toxicity is the "pathogenic cause" to skeletal metastases, while kidney weakness decreases the body defence against the cancer. A vicious cycle ensues when cancer and kidney deficiency and bone weakness occurs simultaneously coincidently and worsens the conditions. / In vitro study on tumour cell lines. The anticancer effects of different concentrations of BBYNG formula and various single components against human breast cancer and lung cancer cell lines were evaluated by cell viability test (MTT assay), cell apoptosis test and invasion suppression test. / In vitro study results. BBYNG and the aqueous extracts of its component herbs at very low drug concentrations stimulated the growth of three tumour cell lines tested. When the concentrations were slightly increased, they showed an inhibitory effect on cancer cell proliferation. As the drug concentrations further increased, the extracts showed cytotoxic effects on these tumor cells. At the noncytotoxic dose, the extracts could trigger apoptosis and enhance the caspase-3 activity in all three tumour cell lines. In addition, at this "non toxic" concentration, the extracts markedly inhibited the in vitro invasive property of the 4T1 breast cancer cell lines in our Matrigel invasion model. Thus these in vitro results suggested that BBYNG possess anticancer, invasion-inhibitory and anti-metastatic activities. / In vivo animal study results. (Tumour growth was slower in the BBYNG treatment group when compared to the OSTAC and control groups, but this was not significantly difference) BBYNG significantly delayed tumour growth in tumour bearing mice, but it did not minimize the tumour size markedly. Moreover, BBNYG did minimize the mobility restriction caused by tumours, reduce the damage to bones, prolong the survival time and enhanced the T lymphocyte immunity. / In vivo animal study. A well-established animal model for breast cancer was used to evaluate and compare the pharmacological effects of BBYNG formula and Clodronic acid, as shown by different indicators such as tumour progression, animal's mobility, survival time, bone metastasis-induced fracture intensity and the immunological status of the tumour-bearing mice. / Malignant tumour is characterized by early metastasis. Among them 37 to 80 (depending on which type of cancer) patients show tendency of bone metastasis. Bone metastasis is usually accompanied by various complications, such as severe pain, pathological bone fracture, hypercalcemia, and bone marrow suppression, which can substantially affect the quality of life of the patients. Thus, the prevention and treatment of bone metastasis in cancer is an issue worth pursuing. / Malignant tumours leading to high mortality and morbidity are a serious threat to human health. It is the leading cause of death in China. In Hong Kong, there are over 20 thousand new cancer cases and more than 1100 people die due to cancers every year. / Study objectives. To elucidate the efficacy and some pharmacological aspects of BBYNG in regard to the treatment of bone metastasis through clinical observation and different laboratory experiments. This study would be of significant reference value to the disease-oriented drug formulation and application, mechanistic study and research methodology of the treatment of bone metastasis using Chinese medicines. / The clinical and laboratory experimental results are summarized as below: / The research study is composed of three parts, the clinical study, in vivo animal study and in vitro study on tumour cell lines. The research methods used are as follows: / Those on BBYNG treatment showed more a stable and satisfactory quality of life than those in the Western medicine-treated group. For the Clodronic acid treatment group, patients generally showed worsened symptoms and quality of life deteriorated. The ECOG index of the BBYNG group was statistically better than that of the Clodronic acid group. Within the 72-week clinical observational period, the mortality of Clodronic acid group is significantly higher that of the BBYNG group. The effects of BBYNG group as presented in relieving the pain-induced influence on patients' emotion, interpersonal relationship and entertainment was more pronounced than that in the Clodronic acid group. / Wu Ka. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2006. / 參考文獻(p. 299-324). / Adviser: Leung Ping Chung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: B, page: 1570. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Lun wen (zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2006. / Can kao wen xian (p. 299-324). / Wu Ka.

The present thesis deals with the Latin non-verbal topic-introducing construction "Quid X?" (which is more or less equivalent to Czech "A co X?" or English "What about X?") and with the question of its editing in the classical Latin Texts. The main hypothesis of the present work is that in the classical Latin texts this construction is in hundreds of cases misinterpreted as "Quid?" (the X-part being joined to the following sentence) which would make of this misinterpretation the greatest systematic error in the modern editing of classical Latin texts. The first part of the thesis presents formal, functional and historical arguments to support such a bold claim and describes other non-verbal constructions beginning with the word quid, which might be and in fact are mistaken with the topic-introducing construction "Quid X?". The inability of the modern editors to reliably distinguish between different non-verbal constructions is caused by several objective factors, one of them being also the fact that the construction "Quid X?" - quite extraordinary in several respects - is rarely and (if at all) unsufficiently treated in grammars and reference books. The absence of the description of the given construction is itself, in turn, caused probably by the general underestimating and overlooking of small...

Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, Faculty of Medicine, 1998. / Typescript. Bibliography: leaves 118-128.

This paper investigates the usage of topic in spoken Brasilian Portuguese, considering it as the constituent on the left of the sentence. To carry out the analysis, we chose the proposal of Callou et alii (1993), which considers the topic lato sensu constructions. The aim of our project is to verify how this phenomenon is used, and to observe if the presence of topic either favors or not the occurrence of lexicalized subject in the sentence. In order to do so, an investigation of topic as well as subject structures was carried out, bearing in mind during the analysis, linguistic and extralinguistic factors such as social class and age group. The corpus used to develop the research consisted of 45 interviews carried out with adult speakers from the city of Uberlândia (MG), from both sexs. The analysis showed that in spite of the little presence in the language, all the informers, irrespective of the social class, age group, used the topic structure, confirming our main hypothesis. In regards to the constructions of the topic lato sensu it was noticed that the Dislocation for de left (DE) is more used than Topicalization (TOP). This fact doesn t confirm our hypothesis but confirms the tendency of Brasilian Portuguese to fill all the empty categories, as already mentioned by many researches. Furthermore, according to the theory of Labovian Sociolinguistics and Parametric Sociolinguistics, in which we based this paper, it was possible to conclude that presence x absence of topic lato sensu constructions, in the sentence, is a process of variation, not a process of linguistic change. / Este trabalho investiga o uso do tópico na língua oral do Português do Brasil, considerando como tal o constituinte à esquerda da sentença. Para realizar a análise, adotamos a proposta de Callou et alii (1993), na qual são consideradas construções de tópico lato sensu. O objetivo do nosso trabalho é verificar de que modo o fenômeno é usado e observar, principalmente, se a presença de tópico favorece ou não a ocorrência de sujeito lexicalizado na sentença. Para tanto, foi feita uma investigação de estruturas de tópico e estruturas de sujeito, levando em consideração, na análise, fatores lingüísticos e fatores extralingüísticos classe social e faixa etária. O corpus utilizado para o desenvolvimento da pesquisa constituiu-se de 45 entrevistas realizadas com falantes adultos da cidade de Uberlândia (MG), de ambos os sexos. A análise realizada evidenciou que, apesar da pouca incidência na língua, todos os informantes, independentemente da classe social e da faixa etária, que fizeram uso da estrutura de tópico, lexicalizaram o sujeito, corroborando, assim, nossa hipótese principal. Especificamente em relação às construções de tópico lato sensu, foi constatado que o Deslocamento à Esquerda (DE) é mais usado do que a Topicialização (TOP). Essa constatação refutou nossa hipótese, mas confirma a tendência do Português do Brasil de preencher categorias vazias, como já foi atestado por vários estudiosos. Além disso, seguindo os pressupostos teóricos da Sociolingüística Laboviana e da Sociolingüística Paramétrica, nos quais fundamentamos nosso trabalho, foi possível concluir que presença x ausência de construções de tópico lato sensu , na sentença, constitui um processo de variação e não de mudança lingüística. / Mestre em Lingüística