Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What is political incivility?

ABSTRACT Using 23 novel indicators and a 1,000+ sample representative of a full undergraduate population we examined: how much consensus there was about perceptions of the incivility/civility of various categories of speech/behavior; and whether political incivility is a unidimensional or multidimensional latent construct. Confirmatory factor analyses suggest perceived political incivility is a multidimensional construct. Insulting utterances, deception, and behaviors tending to shut down inclusive ongoing discussion can be treated as distinct, underlying aspects of incivility. More than 75% of respondents viewed all 23 indicators, except issue-oriented attacks, as very, mostly, or somewhat uncivil. If replicated on a representative national sample, standardized indicators of political incivility should be constructed and routinely employed in national surveys of political attitudes and behavior.
The expectation performance gap in accounting education: a review of generic skills development in UK accounting degrees

ABSTRACT Accounting educators are criticised for a focus on the development of technical skills at the expense of generic employability skills. This study considers the perspective of UK graduates training for the CIMA professional accountancy qualification and examines their perceptions of the extent to which opportunities for generic skills development are exploited in accounting degrees. The results are compared with opportunities for generic skills development in degrees from other discipline areas, formal work-based training and the training undertaken when studying for professional examinations. The results of the questionnaire-based survey suggest that there is scope for improvement in the extent to which universities exploit opportunities for the development of generic skills. However, across most skill areas trainees’ perceptions of opportunities for the development of generic skills in UK accounting degrees are comparable to those offered in other discipline areas and compare favourably to those offered in both professional training and formal work-based training. The results indicate that the development of oral communication skills, the ability to take a comprehensive and global vision of an organisation, resilience and ethical awareness could be improved.
A review of the role of the gut microflora in irritable bowel syndrome and the effects of probiotics

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a multi-factorial gastrointestinal condition affecting 8–22 % of the population with a higher prevalence in women and accounting for 20–50 % of referrals to gastroenterology clinics. It is characterised by abdominal pain, excessive flatus, variable bowel habit and abdominal bloating for which there is no evidence of detectable organic disease. Suggested aetiologies include gut motility and psychological disorders, psychophysiological phenomena and colonic malfermentation. The faecal microflora in IBS has been shown to be abnormal with higher numbers of facultative organisms and low numbers of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria. Although there is no evidence of food allergy in IBS, food intolerance has been identified and exclusion diets are beneficial to many IBS patients. Food intolerance may be due to abnormal fermentation of food residues in the colon, as a result of disruption of the normal flora. The role of probiotics in IBS has not been clearly defined. Some studies have shown improvements in pain and flatulence in response to probiotic administration, whilst others have shown no symptomatic improvement. It is possible that the future role of probiotics in IBS will lie in prevention, rather than cure.
Is Vasomotion in Cerebral Arteries Impaired in Alzheimer’s Disease?

Abstract A substantial body of evidence supports the hypothesis of a vascular component in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Cerebral hypoperfusion and blood-brain barrier dysfunction have been indicated as key elements of this pathway. Cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) is a cerebrovascular disorder, frequent in AD, characterized by the accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide in cerebral blood vessel walls. CAA is associated with loss of vascular integrity, resulting in impaired regulation of cerebral circulation, and increased susceptibility to cerebral ischemia, microhemorrhages, and white matter damage. Vasomotion— the spontaneous rhythmic modulation of arterial diameter, typically observed in arteries/arterioles in various vascular beds including the brain— is thought to participate in tissue perfusion and oxygen delivery regulation. Vasomotion is impaired in adverse conditions such as hypoperfusion and hypoxia. The perivascular and glymphatic pathways of Aβ clearance are thought to be driven by the systolic pulse. Vasomotion produces diameter changes of comparable amplitude, however at lower rates, and could contribute to these mechanisms of Aβ clearance. In spite of potential clinical interest, studies addressing cerebral vasomotion in the context of AD/CAA are limited. This study reviews the current literature on vasomotion, and hypothesizes potential paths implicating impaired cerebral vasomotion in AD/CAA. Aβ and oxidative stress cause vascular tone dysregulation through direct effects on vascular cells, and indirect effects mediated by impaired neurovascular coupling. Vascular tone dysregulation is further aggravated by cholinergic deficit and results in depressed cerebrovascular reactivity and (possibly) impaired vasomotion, aggravating regional hypoperfusion and promoting further Aβ and oxidative stress accumulation.
Improved throughput arithmetic coder for JPEG2000

Increasing the throughput of the JPEG2000 block coder requires bit-plane and arithmetic coders capable of concurrent symbol processing. Previously described pipelined MQ coders are capable of consuming 1 symbol or less per clock cycle. We develop a new pipelined MQ coder that can process exactly two symbols per clock cycle. The technique is implemented on a FPGA, and is compared with our "Hypothesis Testing" arithmetic coder and a reference one symbol per cycle coder. Our implementation gives an increase in throughput of 1.9 times, at the cost of 1.7 times as much hardware, when compared to the reference coder. It also has 1.2 times the throughput, while consuming only 70% of the hardware associated with the Hypothesis Testing coder.
Fault simulation with parallel exact critical path tracing in multiple core environment

A novel fault simulation method is proposed, based on exact critical path tracing beyond the Fan-out-Free Regions (FFR) throughout the full circuit. The method exploits two types of parallelism: bit-level parallelism for multiple pattern reasoning, and distribution the fault reasoning process between different cores in a multi-core processor environment. To increase the speed and accuracy of fault simulation, compared with previous methods, a mixed level fault reasoning approach is developed, were the fan-out re-convergence is handled on the higher FFR network level, and the fault simulation inside of FFRs relies on the gate-level information. To allow a uniform and seamless fault reasoning, Structurally Synthesized BDDs (SSBDD) are used for modeling on both levels. Experimental research demonstrated very promising results in increasing the speed and scalability of the method.
Determination of Axonal and Dendritic Orientation Distributions Within the Developing Cerebral Cortex by Diffusion Tensor Imaging

As neurons of the developing brain form functional circuits, they undergo morphological differentiation. In immature cerebral cortex, radially-oriented cellular processes of undifferentiated neurons impede water diffusion parallel, but not perpendicular, to the pial surface, as measured via diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging, and give rise to water diffusion anisotropy. As the cerebral cortex matures, the loss of water diffusion anisotropy accompanies cellular morphological differentiation. A quantitative relationship is proposed here to relate water diffusion anisotropy measurements directly to characteristics of neuronal morphology. This expression incorporates the effects of local diffusion anisotropy within cellular processes, as well as the effects of anisotropy in the orientations of cellular processes. To obtain experimental support for the proposed relationship, tissue from 13 and 31 day-old ferrets was stained using the rapid Golgi technique, and the 3-D orientation distribution of neuronal proceses was characterized using confocal microscopic examination of reflected visible light images. Coregistration of the MRI and Golgi data enables a quantitative evaluation of the proposed theory, and excellent agreement with the theoretical results, as well as agreement with previously published values for locally-induced water diffusion anisotropy and volume fraction of the neuropil, is observed.
Mitochondrial uncoupling as a regulator of life-history trajectories in birds: an experimental study in the zebra finch

Mitochondria have a fundamental role in the transduction of energy from food into ATP. The coupling between food oxidation and ATP production is never perfect, but may nevertheless be of evolutionary significance. The ‘uncoupling to survive’ hypothesis suggests that ‘mild’ mitochondrial uncoupling evolved as a protective mechanism against the excessive production of damaging reactive oxygen species (ROS). Because resource allocation and ROS production are thought to shape animal life histories, alternative life-history trajectories might be driven by individual variation in the degree of mitochondrial uncoupling. We tested this hypothesis in a small bird species, the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), by treating adults with the artificial mitochondrial uncoupler 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP) over a 32-month period. In agreement with our expectations, the uncoupling treatment increased metabolic rate. However, we found no evidence that treated birds enjoyed lower oxidative stress levels or greater survival rates, in contrast to previous results in other taxa. In vitro experiments revealed lower sensitivity of ROS production to DNP in mitochondria isolated from skeletal muscles of zebra finch than mouse. In addition, we found significant reductions in the number of eggs laid and in the inflammatory immune response in treated birds. Altogether, our data suggest that the ‘uncoupling to survive’ hypothesis may not be applicable for zebra finches, presumably because of lower effects of mitochondrial uncoupling on mitochondrial ROS production in birds than in mammals. Nevertheless, mitochondrial uncoupling appeared to be a potential life-history regulator of traits such as fecundity and immunity at adulthood, even with food supplied ad libitum.
Turbo equalization with nonlinear Kalman filtering for time-varying frequency-selective fading channels

In this paper, we present a low complexity turbo equalization receiver for data transmission over time-varying frequency-selective fading channels. In the receiver, an adaptive equalizer using nonlinear Kalman filters with delay is coupled with a soft-in soft-cut (SISO) decoder to perform the reception process iteratively. The proposed adaptive equalizer jointly optimizes the estimates for channel taps and data symbols in each iteration with the assistance of a priori information for the data symbols supplied by the SISO decoder. In this way, the correlation between the estimates of data symbols and channel taps is taken into account in the equalization process. This correlation is usually ignored in many other turbo equalizers with separated channel estimation and data equalization. The complexity of the proposed equalizer does not grow exponentially with the modulation constellation size, and is usually lower than that of many maximum a posteriori equalizers with joint channel estimation and data detection. Performance comparison with different types of turbo equalizers over different channel conditions by Monte Carlo simulations demonstrates the advantage of the proposed turbo equalizer for fast time-varying fading channels
Parallel Sequential Monte Carlo for Efficient Density Combination: The Deco Matlab Toolbox

This paper presents the Matlab package DeCo (Density Combination) which is based on the paper by Billio et al. (2013) where a constructive Bayesian approach is presented for combining predictive densities originating from different models or other sources of information. The combination weights are time-varying and may depend on past predictive forecasting performances and other learning mechanisms. The core algorithm is the function DeCo which applies banks of parallel Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms to filter the time-varying combination weights. The DeCo procedure has been implemented both for standard CPU computing and for Graphical Process Unit (GPU) parallel computing. For the GPU implementation we use the Matlab parallel computing toolbox and show how to use General Purposes GPU computing almost effortless. This GPU implementation comes with a speed up of the execution time up to seventy times compared to a standard CPU Matlab implementation on a multicore CPU. We show the use of the package and the computational gain of the GPU version, through some simulation experiments and empirical applications.
Hierarchical segment boost : a segment level classification approach to object class recognition

In this work we address the problem of object recognition and localization within cluttered, natural scenes. Specifically we present a new approach to recognizing deformable objects that uses only local information. We suggest a new method of computing labels for arbitrary regions within an image using only local color and texture information. The results demonstrate our success in both identifying and localizing several classes of objects within cluttered scenes. We make two primary contributions to the field of deformable object recognition. First we present a new technique for labeling arbitrary regions within an image using texture and color features. Second we introduce a hierarchical approach to combining the classification results from segmentations of different granularity. Since the field of deformable object recognition is still in its infancy, we hope the work presented here will be used as a stepping stone to developing more complex, multi-object detection systems.
Do automated transcripts help non-native speakers catch up on missed conversation in audio conferences?

Previous work has suggested that speeded up playback of recorded audio works well for native speakers (NS) to catch up on conversation they missed in real-time audio conferences. However, this might not be the case for non-native speakers (NNS) who normally have lower listening ability in their second language. In this study, we explore whether automated speech recognition (ASR) technology can aid NNS when combined with speeded up audio playback. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which 18 NS and 18 NNS listened to a pre-recorded audio conference with three English native speakers, during which they were briefly interrupted and missed parts of the ongoing conversation. They then caught up to the conversation with speeded up audio only (1.6x) and speeded up audio with ASR transcripts. Although ASR transcripts did not improve their comprehension of the conversational content when catching up, transcripts allowed NNS to shift their focus between the two modalities depending on their ability to follow second language speech in different audio speeds. The findings inform future development of ASR tools to support multilingual group communication.
Master's Thesis Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

2010 I dedicate this thesis to my family, especially to my mother, who supports me and encourages me throughout my whole life. I would like to thank my supervisor, Ing. Zdeněk Žabokrtský, Ph.D., for his patience and for his valuable expert advices. Moreover, I really appreciate that my supervisor and one of my friends, Mgr. Pavol Rusnák, provided me with a technical support for development and testing. This work would not be possible without the project of extended annotation of PDT led by Mgr. Anja Nědolužko and RNDr. Jiří Mírovský, Ph.D. I would like to thank them, too. I declare I wrote my thesis by myself and listed all used references. I agree with making the thesis publicly available.
Automatic evaluation of translation quality using expanded N-gram co-occurrence

BLEU and NIST as official machine translation evaluation metrics are widely used to assess system translation quality. These n-gram co-occurrence algorithms are applied to evaluate language learners' translations in this paper. Subtle differences of evaluation on machine translation and learners' translation are discussed. Dependent on n-gram matching between target translation and references, BLEU and NIST evaluate translation quality completely disregarding the source language. Based on sense overlapping in original language, we make pseudo translations for BLEU and NIST by substituting words or phrases in target translation for synonymous words and phrases in references. Pseudo translations expand n-gram co-occurrence between target translation and references. Evaluation experiments on learners' translation and machine translation corpus with expanded n-gram co-occurrence outperform pure BLEU and NIST evaluation in higher correlation with human assessments.
The structure of the membrane systems in a novel muscle cell modified for heat production

A thermogenic organ, modified from an eye muscle, warms the brain and eyes of several oceanic fish. The extraocular muscles associated with thermogenesis are composed of modified muscle cells that are structurally distinct from all other types of muscle previously described. In "heater" cells, contractile filaments are virtually absent and the cell volume is packed with mitochondria and smooth membranes. Freeze-fracture studies and negative staining of microsomal fractions treated with vanadate indicate that most of the membrane system of heater cells has a high Ca2+-ATPase density and is equivalent to skeletal muscle sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR). High voltage electron micrographs of heater cells infiltrated with the Golgi stain demonstrate that the cells also have an extensive transverse tubule system with a complicated three-dimensional structure. Junctional regions between transverse tubules and SR occur in the heater cell and contain feet protein. Activation of thermogenesis in heater cells may occur through the same protein components involved in excitation- contraction coupling and appears to be associated with the ATP- dependent cycling of calcium at the SR.
Symptom Interval and Patient Delay Affect Survival Outcomes in Adolescent Cancer Patients

Purpose Unique features of adolescent cancer patients include cancer types, developmental stages, and psychosocial issues. In this study, we evaluated the relationship between diagnostic delay and survival to improve adolescent cancer care. Materials and Methods A total of 592 patients aged 0–18 years with eight common cancers were grouped according to age (adolescents, ≥10 years; children, <10 years). We retrospectively reviewed their symptom intervals (SIs, between first symptom/sign of disease and diagnosis), patient delay (PD, between first symptom/sign of disease and first contact with a physician), patient delay proportion (PDP), and overall survival (OS). Results Mean SI was significantly longer in adolescents than in children (66.4 days vs. 28.4 days; p<0.001), and OS rates were higher in patients with longer SIs (p=0.001). In children with long SIs, OS did not differ according to PDP (p=0.753). In adolescents with long SIs, OS was worse when PDP was ≥0.6 (67.2%) than <0.6 (95.5%, p=0.007). In a multivariate analysis, adolescents in the long SI/PDP ≥0.6 group tended to have a higher hazard ratio (HR, 6.483; p=0.069) than those in the long SI/PDP <0.6 group (HR=1, reference). Conclusion Adolescents with a long SI/PDP ≥0.6 had lower survival rates than those with a short SI/all PDP or a long SI/PDP <0.6. They should be encouraged to seek prompt medical assistance by a physician or oncologist to lessen PDs.
Hepatocyte Growth Factor Modulates MET Receptor Tyrosine Kinase and β-Catenin Functional Interactions to Enhance Synapse Formation

Visual Abstract MET, a pleiotropic receptor tyrosine kinase implicated in autism risk, influences multiple neurodevelopmental processes. There is a knowledge gap, however, in the molecular mechanism through which MET mediates developmental events related to disorder risk. In the neocortex, MET is expressed transiently during periods of peak dendritic outgrowth and synaptogenesis, with expression enriched at developing synapses, consistent with demonstrated roles in dendritic morphogenesis, modulation of spine volume, and excitatory synapse development. In a recent coimmunoprecipitation/mass spectrometry screen, β-catenin was identified as part of the MET interactome in developing neocortical synaptosomes. Here, we investigated the influence of the MET/β-catenin complex in mouse neocortical synaptogenesis. Western blot analysis confirms that MET and β-catenin coimmunoprecipitate, but N-cadherin is not associated with the MET complex. Following stimulation with hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), β-catenin is phosphorylated at tyrosine142 (Y142) and dissociates from MET, accompanied by an increase in β-catenin/N-cadherin and MET/synapsin 1 protein complexes. In neocortical neurons in vitro, proximity ligation assays confirmed the close proximity of these proteins. Moreover, in neurons transfected with synaptophysin-GFP, HGF stimulation increases the density of synaptophysin/bassoon (a presynaptic marker) and synaptophysin/PSD-95 (a postsynaptic marker) clusters. Mutation of β-catenin at Y142 disrupts the dissociation of the MET/β-catenin complex and prevents the increase in clusters in response to HGF. The data demonstrate a new mechanism for the modulation of synapse formation, whereby MET activation induces an alignment of presynaptic and postsynaptic elements that are necessary for assembly and formation of functional synapses by subsets of neocortical neurons that express MET/β-catenin complex.
Simultaneously Mitigating Near-Term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security

Why Wait? Tropospheric ozone can be dangerous to human health, can be harmful to vegetation, and is a major contributor to climate warming. Black carbon also has significant negative effects on health and air quality and causes warming of the atmosphere. Shindell et al. (p. 183) present results of an analysis of emissions, atmospheric processes, and impacts for each of these pollutants. Seven measures were identified that, if rapidly implemented, would significantly reduce global warming over the next 50 years, with the potential to prevent millions of deaths worldwide from outdoor air pollution. Furthermore, some crop yields could be improved by decreasing agricultural damage. Most of the measures thus appear to have economic benefits well above the cost of their implementation. Reducing anthropogenic emissions of methane and black carbon would have multiple climate and health benefits. Tropospheric ozone and black carbon (BC) contribute to both degraded air quality and global warming. We considered ~400 emission control measures to reduce these pollutants by using current technology and experience. We identified 14 measures targeting methane and BC emissions that reduce projected global mean warming ~0.5°C by 2050. This strategy avoids 0.7 to 4.7 million annual premature deaths from outdoor air pollution and increases annual crop yields by 30 to 135 million metric tons due to ozone reductions in 2030 and beyond. Benefits of methane emissions reductions are valued at $700 to $5000 per metric ton, which is well above typical marginal abatement costs (less than $250). The selected controls target different sources and influence climate on shorter time scales than those of carbon dioxide–reduction measures. Implementing both substantially reduces the risks of crossing the 2°C threshold.