Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A family-oriented psychosocial intervention reduces inflammation in low-SES African American youth

Significance Children from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) are vulnerable to a variety of health problems. These risks begin in early childhood and persist across the lifecourse. Studies hint that nurturant parenting may offset these health risks, but it remains unclear whether these findings reflect a causal process and have clinical utility. Here we describe a randomized controlled trial, which sought to improve parenting and build youth competencies in low-SES African American families. The endpoint was low-grade inflammation, a process that underlies many health problems to which low-SES youth are vulnerable. Eight years after the intervention, youth who participated had significantly less inflammation than controls. If substantiated, these findings may provide a strategy for narrowing some of America’s social and racial disparities in health. Children of low socioeconomic status (SES) are at elevated risk for health problems across the lifespan. Observational studies suggest that nurturant parenting might offset some of these health risks, but their design precludes inferences about causal direction and clinical utility. Here we ask whether a psychosocial intervention, focused improving parenting, strengthening family relationships, and building youth competencies, can reduce inflammation in low-SES, African Americans from the rural South. The trial involved 272 mothers and their 11-y-old children from rural Georgia, half of whose annual household incomes were below the federal poverty line. Families were randomly assigned to a 7-wk psychosocial intervention or to a control condition. When youth reached age 19, peripheral blood was collected to quantify six cytokines that orchestrate inflammation, the dysregulation of which contributes to many of the health problems known to pattern by SES. Youth who participated in the intervention had significantly less inflammation on all six indicators relative to controls (all P values < 0.001; effect sizes in Cohen’s d units ranged from −0.69 to −0.91). Mediation analyses suggested that improved parenting was partially responsible for the intervention’s benefits. Inflammation was lowest among youth who received more nurturant-involved parenting, and less harsh-inconsistent parenting, as a consequence of the intervention. These findings have theoretical implications for research on resilience to adversity and the early origins of disease. If substantiated, they may also highlight a strategy for practitioners and policymakers to use in ameliorating social and racial health disparities.
Loss of APC induces polyploidy as a result of a combination of defects in mitosis and apoptosis

Mutations in the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) tumor suppressor gene initiate a majority of colorectal cancers. Acquisition of chromosomal instability is an early event in these tumors. We provide evidence that the loss of APC leads to a partial loss of interkinetochore tension at metaphase and alters mitotic progression. Furthermore, we show that inhibition of APC in U2OS cells compromises the mitotic spindle checkpoint. This is accompanied by a decrease in the association of the checkpoint proteins Bub1 and BubR1 with kinetochores. Additionally, APC depletion reduced apoptosis. As expected from this combination of defects, tetraploidy and polyploidy are consequences of APC inhibition in vitro and in vivo. The removal of APC produced the same defects in HCT116 cells that have constitutively active β-catenin. These data show that the loss of APC immediately induces chromosomal instability as a result of a combination of mitotic and apoptotic defects. We suggest that these defects amplify each other to increase the incidence of tetra- and polyploidy in early stages of tumorigenesis.
Energetic efficiency and stability of dynamic bipedal walking gaits with different step lengths

This paper presents a seven-link dynamic walking model that is more close to human beings. We add hip actuation, upper body, flat feet and compliant ankle joints to the model. Walking sequence of the flat-foot walker has several sub-streams that form bipedal walking with dynamic series of phases, which is different with the motion of round-foot and point-foot models. We investigate the characteristics of three different walking gaits with different step lengths. Comparison of these walking gaits in walking velocity, efficiency and stability reveals the relation between step length and walking performance. Experimental results indicate that the gait which is more close to human normal walking achieves higher stability and energetic efficiency.
Optimizing Differentiable Relaxations of Coreference Evaluation Metrics

Coreference evaluation metrics are hard to optimize directly as they are non-differentiable functions, not easily decomposable into elementary decisions. Consequently, most approaches optimize objectives only indirectly related to the end goal, resulting in suboptimal performance. Instead, we propose a differentiable relaxation that lends itself to gradient-based optimisation, thus bypassing the need for reinforcement learning or heuristic modification of cross-entropy. We show that by modifying the training objective of a competitive neural coreference system, we obtain a substantial gain in performance. This suggests that our approach can be regarded as a viable alternative to using reinforcement learning or more computationally expensive imitation learning.
Multichannel bed pressure sensor for sleep monitoring

A bed sensor with multiple pressure sensitive non-contacting electrodes has been applied for unobtrusive monitoring during sleep. The novelty is in using multichannel algorithms to improve extraction of the heart rate and respiration signal from the recorded ballistocardiographic (BCG) data. Heart rate is extracted by using a sliding Fourier Transform, and after averaging the sensor channels in the frequency domain, the attained resolution enables to detect individual heart beat intervals (HBI) and estimate the heart rate variability (HRV). The respiration signal is calculated from the low pass filtered BCG signals by updating the linear coefficients with an adaptive principal component analysis (PCA) model. In comparison to the reference ECG R-R interval, the relative error of the HBI has been 0.40 % with 88 % measurement coverage for the healthy subjects during normal sleep. The error of the respiratory rate estimated from the bed sensor has been 1.5 % in comparison with the respiratory inductive plethysmogram (RIP). For the group of patients having different kinds of suspected sleep disorders, the measurement coverage varied a lot between subjects due to increased movement artifacts. In this case, some examples of detecting respiratory disorders with bed sensor signals are shown.
Further X-ray observations of the galaxy cluster PKS 0745-191 to the virial radius and beyond

We use new Suzaku observations of PKS 0745−191 to measure the thermodynamic properties of its intracluster medium (ICM) out to and beyond r200 (reaching 1.25r200) with better accuracy than previously achieved, owing to a more accurate and better understood background model. We investigate and resolve the tensions between the previous Suzaku and ROSAT results for PKS 0745−191, which are found to be principally caused by incorrect background modelling in the previous Suzaku analysis. We investigate in depth the systematic errors affecting this observation, and present temperature, density, entropy and gas mass fraction profiles reaching out to and beyond the virial radius. We find that the entropy profile flattens in the outskirts as originally observed in the previous Suzaku analysis, but that the flattening starts at larger radius. The flattening of the entropy profile and our mass analysis suggest that outside ∼17 arcmin (∼1.9 Mpc) the ICM is out of hydrostatic equilibrium or the presence of significant non-thermal pressure support.
PEMIKIRAN SISWA KETIKA MENYELESAIKAN SOAL-SOAL TEXTBOOK DAN REAL-WORLD

The study aimed to find students’ ideas in solving oscillation harmonic motion, spesifically frequence of mass-spring system. The study conducted on 36 students in one of Malang state high school. Multiple choice with reason were used as instrument. The result show that most of students were more expert on solving texbook problem than real-world problem. Most of students’ argument on real world problem were not relevant. The dificculty was not caused by students’ blank slate but by recalling failed. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pemikiran-pemikiran siswa dalam menyelesaikan persoalan terkait gerak osilasi, khususnya pada topik frekuensi sistem pegas-massa. Penelitian dilakukan di salah satu SMA Negeri di Malang dengan subjek penelitian sebanyak 36 siswa. Penelitian dilakukan dengan memberikan soal-soal pilihan ganda beralasan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa siswa lebih mahir dalam menyelesaikan soal textbook dibandingkan soal-soal real-world . Argumen yang dipaparkan siswa pada soal-soal real-world kebanyakan tidak relevan dengan persoalan yang diberikan. Kesulitan siswa ini bukan karena siswa tidak memiliki pengetahuan terkait dengan persoalan, namun karena gagal memanggilnya.
The Impact of Bully Victimization and Substance Use on Suicidal Behavior in Sexual Minority Youth

Bully victimization has been shown to be associated with a variety of problems in adolescence. Adolescent bully victims endorse higher rates of substance use, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. One possible explanation is that adolescents who are bullied use substances to cope with victimization and turn to suicidal behaviors when this coping mechanism proves ineffective. Sexual orientation is one variable that is believed to moderate these relationships. Nonheterosexual youth are more likely to be victimized by peers, engage in substance use, and experience suicidality. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between bully victimization, substance use, suicidality, and sexual orientation in a national sample of adolescents. I hypothesized that bully victimization will be positively associated with suicidality and substance use will mediate this relationship. I also predicted sexual orientation would moderate all relationships. Data was drawn from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey, a large-scale survey measuring health-risk behaviors contributing to death and disability in youth. The survey contains questions about frequency of bully victimization, engagement in substance use, and prevalence of suicidal behaviors. Participants are also asked about a variety of demographic variables, including sexual orientation. Adolescents in this study completed the survey in 2015. Half of the participants were male, with a mean age of 16. The sample was representative of the U.S. population, with 45.0% identifying as non-Hispanic White, 33.5% as Hispanic, 10.9% as non-Hispanic Black, and 10.7% identifying as Other. A moderated mediation model revealed that the indirect effect of bully victimization through substance use to suicidality was significant for heterosexual (b = .029, SE = .003, CI99 = .022, .038) and sexual BULLYING, SUBSTANCE USE, AND SUICIDALITY ix minority (b = .040, SE = .009, CI99 = .020, .066) adolescents. Sexual orientation moderated the relationships between bully victimization and substance use and bully victimization and suicidality. It did not moderate the relationship between substance use and suicidality. Results suggest that sexual minority youth are at an increased risk for substance use and suicidality when victimized. Results also highlight the importance of addressing bully victimization when providing mental health and substance use services to adolescents.
Naive Bayes Software Defect Prediction Model

Although the value of using static code attributes to learn defect predictor has been widely debated, there is no doubt that software defect predictions can effectively improve software quality and testing efficiency. Many data mining methods have already been introduced into defect predictions. We noted there have several versions of defect predictor based on Naive Bayes theory, and analyzed their difference estimation method and algorithm complexity. We found the best one which is Multi- variants Gauss Naive Bayes (MvGNB) by performing prediction performance evaluation, and we compared this model with decision tree learner J48. Experiment results on the benchmarking data sets of MDP made us believe that MvGNB would be useful for defect predictions.
Connectivity-Based Brain Parcellation - A Connectivity-Based Atlas for Schizophrenia Research

Defining brain structures of interest is an important preliminary step in brain-connectivity analysis. Researchers interested in connectivity patterns among brain structures typically employ manually delineated volumes of interest, or regions in a readily available atlas, to limit the scope of connectivity analysis to relevant regions. However, most structural brain atlases, and manually delineated volumes of interest, do not take voxel-wise connectivity patterns into consideration, and therefore may not be ideal for anatomic connectivity analysis. We herein propose a method to parcellate the brain into regions of interest based on connectivity. We formulate connectivity-based parcellation as a graph-cut problem, which we solve approximately using a novel multi-class Hopfield network algorithm. We demonstrate the application of this approach using diffusion tensor imaging data from an ongoing study of schizophrenia. Compared to a standard anatomic atlas, the connectivitybased atlas supports better classification performance when Qi Wang qiwang321@gmail.com Joseph JaJa joseph@umiacs.umd. edu
A novel robust background modeling algorithm for complex natural scenes

Background modeling is fundamentally important in the computer vision tasks such as image understanding, object tracking and video surveillance. It is especially difficult in the complex natural scenes, mainly due to two matters: 1) gross errors resulted by random outliers that can not be described in a uniform distribution; 2) structural confusion cluttered by sample sets' polymorphism, which is originated by multiple structures. For dealing with these problems, a novel robust background modeling algorithm is presented. The model is established by an improved Multi-RANSAC approach for dynamic background pixels and by one-tail trimmed sample mean estimator for static pixels. A three-component-set is derived for the model so that it can be updated quickly in a unified framework for both types. It stands right even when there are more than 70 percent outliers and is fit for complex natural scenes. Quantitative evaluation and comparisons with traditional methods show that the proposed method has much improved results.
Molecular Analysis and Genomic Organization of Major DNA Satellites in Banana (Musa spp.)

Satellite DNA sequences consist of tandemly arranged repetitive units up to thousands nucleotides long in head-to-tail orientation. The evolutionary processes by which satellites arise and evolve include unequal crossing over, gene conversion, transposition and extra chromosomal circular DNA formation. Large blocks of satellite DNA are often observed in heterochromatic regions of chromosomes and are a typical component of centromeric and telomeric regions. Satellite-rich loci may show specific banding patterns and facilitate chromosome identification and analysis of structural chromosome changes. Unlike many other genomes, nuclear genomes of banana (Musa spp.) are poor in satellite DNA and the information on this class of DNA remains limited. The banana cultivars are seed sterile clones originating mostly from natural intra-specific crosses within M. acuminata (A genome) and inter-specific crosses between M. acuminata and M. balbisiana (B genome). Previous studies revealed the closely related nature of the A and B genomes, including similarities in repetitive DNA. In this study we focused on two main banana DNA satellites, which were previously identified in silico. Their genomic organization and molecular diversity was analyzed in a set of nineteen Musa accessions, including representatives of A, B and S (M. schizocarpa) genomes and their inter-specific hybrids. The two DNA satellites showed a high level of sequence conservation within, and a high homology between Musa species. FISH with probes for the satellite DNA sequences, rRNA genes and a single-copy BAC clone 2G17 resulted in characteristic chromosome banding patterns in M. acuminata and M. balbisiana which may aid in determining genomic constitution in interspecific hybrids. In addition to improving the knowledge on Musa satellite DNA, our study increases the number of cytogenetic markers and the number of individual chromosomes, which can be identified in Musa.
Evaluation of the Dynamic Model of Fluidic Muscles using Quick-Release

By using artificial muscles in robotics one can use the analogy of the biological motor for locomotion or manipulation. There are a lot of advantages like the passive damping, good power-weight ratio and usage in rough environments. The main drawback of this muscle is that their dynamic behavior is highly nonlinear. Due to this a deep knowledge of the muscle properties and behaviors is needed to use the artificial muscle in robotics. By using the different published muscle models and our own experience we developed an advanced model for the muscle force. To validate this model a set-up like the well known quick-release test for biological muscles is used. In the future the advanced model of the fluidic muscle will help to improve the behavior of the robot PANTER and is the first step in building a biomechanical inspired two-legged robot that is able to run and walk elastically
Adaptive Gain Control for Enhanced Speech Intelligibility Under Reverberation

Overlap-masking reduces speech intelligibility in reverberant environments. In contrast to additive noise, the masking signal depends on the past of the speech signal. An increase in output signal power is followed by an increase in reverberation power. Taking into consideration, the mechanics of reverberation is essential for the development of speech modifications that effectively increase intelligibility. This letter proposes a mathematical framework that optimizes the full-band signal power as a function of late reverberation power and the degree of signal nonstationarity. The prescribed signal gain is smoothed adaptively to suppress artifacts that may be introduced by rapid gain fluctuations due to frame-based processing. Compared to a reference method, it is shown that higher signal-to-late-reverberation ratio in nonstationary regions of the speech signal is achieved with less aggressive, on average, gain modification. A listening test with native English speakers on meaningful sentences under strong reverberation measured a consistent and significant improvement in intelligibility over natural speech and a reference method.
Analyzing Scrip Systems Citation

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Scrip systems provide a non-monetary trade economy for exchange of resources. We model a scrip system as a stochastic game and study system design issues on selection rules to match potential trade partners over time. We show the optimality of one particular rule in terms of maximizing social welfare for a given scrip system that guarantees players' incentives to participate. We also investigate the optimal number of scrips to issue under this rule. In particular, if the time discount factor is close enough to 1, or trade benefits one partner much more than it costs the other, the maximum social welfare is always achieved no matter how many scrips are in the system. When the benefit of trade and time discount are not sufficiently large, on the other hand, injecting more scrips in the system hurts most participants; as a result, there is an upper bound on the number of scrips allowed in the system, above which some players may default. We show that this upper bound increases with the discount factor as well as the ratio between the benefit and cost of service. Finally, we demonstrate similar properties for a different service provider selection rule that has been analyzed in previous literature. Scrips are coupons that are used in place of currency to exchange goods and services; typically, they cannot be exchanged for money, and therefore their sole use is for the good or service which they are intended for. In this paper we study scrip systems, which are markets that use scrips rather than money to exchange goods and services. Such markets are typically implemented when the use of governmental currency is impractical or undesirable. One example of a scrip system is that of the Capitol Hill babysitting coop , introduced in Sweeney and Sweeney (1977). A group of about 150 married couples with children who lived in the Washington, D.C. area were tired of looking for and hiring babysitters to watch their children every 2 Article submitted to ; manuscript no. (Please, provide the manuscript number! ) time they wanted to enjoy a night out. These couples decided to join together to form a babysitting coop , or scrip system, to help alleviate this problem. Every couple in the coop was given an initial amount of coupons, or scrips. …