Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reviewing affective, behavioural and cognitive learning gains in higher education

Abstract The notion of learning gains has increasingly become apparent within the higher education literature and is gaining traction in government policies in the US and UK, reflecting a desire to “quantify” the impact of university study and teaching excellence in particular. Given the increased policy focus on learning gains, it is essential that researchers and policy makers are informed about common used approaches to measure learning gains, and their expected range and magnitude. Therefore, a systematic literature search was undertaken. 52 studies (n = 41,009) were coded into affective, behavioural and/or cognitive learning gains. The review found a rich but diverse variety of adopted methodologies and approaches to “measure” affective, behavioural and cognitive (ABC) learning gains. Nonetheless, there is a lack of consistency in the ways in which learning gains are currently measured and reported. These inconsistencies and limitations hamper effective comparisons of learning gains and teaching excellence. We recommend a greater emphasis on longitudinal measurement of learning gains using validated approaches.
A Jump Diffusion Model for Option Pricing

Brownian motion and normal distribution have been widely used in the Black--Scholes option-pricing framework to model the return of assets. However, two puzzles emerge from many empirical investigations: the leptokurtic feature that the return distribution of assets may have a higher peak and two (asymmetric) heavier tails than those of the normal distribution, and an empirical phenomenon called "volatility smile" in option markets. To incorporate both of them and to strike a balance between reality and tractability, this paper proposes, for the purpose of option pricing, a double exponential jump-diffusion model. In particular, the model is simple enough to produce analytical solutions for a variety of option-pricing problems, including call and put options, interest rate derivatives, and path-dependent options. Equilibrium analysis and a psychological interpretation of the model are also presented.
Testing Semantic Similarity Measures for Extracting Synonyms from a Corpus

The definition of lexical semantic similarity measures has been the subject of lots of works for many years. In this article, we focus more specifically on distributional semantic similarity measures. Although several evaluations of this kind of measures were already achieved for determining if they actually catch semantic relatedness, it is still difficult to determine if a measure that performs well in an evaluation framework can be applied more widely with the same success. In the work we present here, we first select a semantic similarity measure by testing a large set of such measures against the WordNet-based Synonymy Test, an extended TOEFL test proposed in (Freitag et al., 2005), and we show that its accuracy is comparable to the accuracy of the best state of the art measures while it has less demanding requirements. Then, we apply this measure for extracting automatically synonyms from a corpus and we evaluate the relevance of this process against two reference resources, WordNet and the Moby thesaurus. Finally, we compare our results in details to those of (Curran and Moens, 2002).
Quercetin Reduces Ehrlich Tumor-Induced Cancer Pain in Mice

Cancer pain directly affects the patient's quality of life. We have previously demonstrated that the subcutaneous administration of the mammary adenocarcinoma known as Ehrlich tumor induces pain in mice. Several studies have shown that the flavonoid quercetin presents important biological effects, including anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, analgesic, and antitumor activity. Therefore, the analgesic effect and mechanisms of quercetin were evaluated in Ehrlich tumor-induced cancer pain in mice. Intraperitoneal (i.p.) treatments with quercetin reduced Ehrlich tumor-induced mechanical and thermal hyperalgesia, but not paw thickness or histological alterations, indicating an analgesic effect without affecting tumor growth. Regarding the analgesic mechanisms of quercetin, it inhibited the production of hyperalgesic cytokines IL-1β and TNFα and decreased neutrophil recruitment (myeloperoxidase activity) and oxidative stress. Naloxone (opioid receptor antagonist) inhibited quercetin analgesia without interfering with neutrophil recruitment, cytokine production, and oxidative stress. Importantly, cotreatment with morphine and quercetin at doses that were ineffective as single treatment reduced the nociceptive responses. Concluding, quercetin reduces the Ehrlich tumor-induced cancer pain by reducing the production of hyperalgesic cytokines, neutrophil recruitment, and oxidative stress as well as by activating an opioid-dependent analgesic pathway and potentiation of morphine analgesia. Thus, quercetin treatment seems a suitable therapeutic approach for cancer pain that merits further investigation.
2016 Ieee International Conference on Big Data (big Data) Phishing through Social Bots on Twitter

—This work investigates how social bots can phish employees of organizations, and thus endanger corporate network security. Current literature mostly focuses on traditional phishing methods (through e-mail, phone calls, and USB sticks). We address the serious organizational threats and security risks caused by phishing through online social media, specifically through Twitter. This paper first provides a review of current work. It then describes our experimental development, in which we created and deployed eight social bots on Twitter, each associated with one specific subject. For a period of four weeks, each bot published tweets about its subject and followed people with similar interests. In the final two weeks, our experiment showed that 437 unique users could have been phished, 33 of which visited our website through the network of an organization. Without revealing any sensitive or real data, the paper analyses some findings of this experiment and addresses further plans for research in this area.
Using Reservoir Computing for Forecasting Time Series: Brazilian Case Study

This paper presents a Brazilian case study of forecasting a wind speed time series with reservoir computing (RC). RC is a research area, in which an untrained recurrent network of nodes is used for the recognition of temporal patters. In RC only the weights of the connections in a linear output layer are trained. This reduces the complexity of recurrent neural networks (RNN) training to simple linear regression. In this work we used echo state network (ESN) to create the case study and compare the results with Multilayer Perceptron Networks and persistence method. Our case study concerns forecasting the wind speed, which is fundamental information in the operation planning for electrical wind power systems. The results showed that the RC performed significantly better than multilayer perceptron networks or persistence method, even though it presents a significantly simpler and faster, training algorithm.
Dendritic K+ channels contribute to spike-timing dependent long-term potentiation in hippocampal pyramidal neurons

We investigated the role of A-type K+ channels for the induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) of Schaffer collateral inputs to hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons. When low-amplitude excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) were paired with two postsynaptic action potentials in a theta-burst pattern, N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA)-receptor-dependent LTP was induced. The amplitudes of the back-propagating action potentials were boosted in the dendrites only when they were coincident with the EPSPs. Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) inhibitors PD 098059 or U0126 shifted the activation of dendritic K+ channels to more hyperpolarized potentials, reduced the boosting of dendritic action potentials by EPSPs, and suppressed the induction of LTP. These results support the hypothesis that dendritic K+ channels and the boosting of back-propagating action potentials contribute to the induction of LTP in CA1 neurons.
The effect of misclassification error on risk estimation in case-control studies.

INTRODUCTION In epidemiological studies, misclassification error, especially differential misclassification, has serious implications. OBJECTIVE To illustrate how differential misclassification error (DME) and non-differential misclassification error (NDME) occur in a case-control design and to describe the trends in DME and NDME. METHODS Different sensitivity levels, specificity levels, prevalence rates and odds ratios were simulated. Interaction graphics were constructed to study bias in the different settings, and the effect of the different factors on bias was described using linear models. RESULTS One hundred per cent of the biases caused by NDME were negative. DME biased the association positively more often than it did negatively (70 versus 30%), increasing or decreasing the OR estimate towards the null hypothesis. CONCLUSIONS The effect of the sensitivity and specificity in classifying exposure, the prevalence of exposure in controls and true OR differed between positive and negative biases. The use of valid exposure classification instruments with high sensitivity and high specificity is recommended to mitigate this type of bias.
Evaluation of using active circuitry for substrate noise suppression

The performance of system-on-chips can be severely degraded if noisy circuits interfere with sensitive circuits through the common silicon substrate. Many methods have been proposed to suppress such substrate noise, ranging from designing circuits that generateless noise to using guard bands to prevent noise from reaching the sensitive parts. In this paper we have investigated a proposed method for substrate noise suppression using active circuitry, and compared it with two passive methods; resistive grounding and capacitive decoupling. Published results indicate that active noise suppression outperforms passive noise suppression. However, these results are based on simulations using over simplified substrate models, like single node or resistor T-models. In this paper we confirm these previous results, but we also show that when using a more realistic substrate model these advantages disappear! We claim that there is no noticeable difference between active noise suppression and DC grounding; these two methods are comparable and better than capacitive decoupling. The substrate resistivity in system-on-chip solutions typically result in large substrate resistances that decrease the efficiency of active decoupling compared to simple DC grounding.
SmudgeSafe: geometric image transformations for smudge-resistant user authentication

Touch-enabled user interfaces have become ubiquitous, such as on ATMs or portable devices. At the same time, authentication using touch input is problematic, since finger smudge traces may allow attackers to reconstruct passwords. We present SmudgeSafe, an authentication system that uses random geometric image transformations, such as translation, rotation, scaling, shearing, and flipping, to increase the security of cued-recall graphical passwords. We describe the design space of these transformations and report on two user studies: A lab-based security study involving 20 participants in attacking user-defined passwords, using high quality pictures of real smudge traces captured on a mobile phone display; and an in-the-field usability study with 374 participants who generated more than 130,000 logins on a mobile phone implementation of SmudgeSafe. Results show that SmudgeSafe significantly increases security compared to authentication schemes based on PINs and lock patterns, and exhibits very high learnability, efficiency, and memorability.
Receive Combining vs. Multi-Stream Multiplexing in Downlink Systems With Multi-Antenna Users

In downlink multi-antenna systems with many users, the multiplexing gain is strictly limited by the number of transmit antennas N and the use of these antennas. Assuming that the total number of receive antennas at the multi-antenna users is much larger than N, the maximal multiplexing gain can be achieved with many different transmission/reception strategies. For example, the excess number of receive antennas can be utilized to schedule users with effective channels that are near-orthogonal, for multi-stream multiplexing to users with well-conditioned channels, and/or to enable interference-aware receive combining. In this paper, we try to answer the question if the N data streams should be divided among few users (many streams per user) or many users (few streams per user, enabling receive combining). Analytic results are derived to show how user selection, spatial correlation, heterogeneous user conditions, and imperfect channel acquisition (quantization or estimation errors) affect the performance when sending the maximal number of streams or one stream per scheduled user-the two extremes in data stream allocation. While contradicting observations on this topic have been reported in prior works, we show that selecting many users and allocating one stream per user (i.e., exploiting receive combining) is the best candidate under realistic conditions. This is explained by the provably stronger resilience towards spatial correlation and the larger benefit from multi-user diversity. This fundamental result has positive implications for the design of downlink systems as it reduces the hardware requirements at the user devices and simplifies the throughput optimization.
COLOR–MAGNITUDE RELATIONS OF EARLY-TYPE DWARF GALAXIES IN THE VIRGO CLUSTER: AN ULTRAVIOLET PERSPECTIVE

We present ultraviolet (UV) color–magnitude relations (CMRs) of early-type dwarf galaxies in the Virgo cluster, based on Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) UV and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) optical imaging data. We find that dwarf lenticular galaxies (dS0s), including peculiar dwarf elliptical galaxies (dEs) with disk substructures and blue centers, show a surprisingly distinct and tight locus separated from that of ordinary dEs, which is not clearly seen in previous CMRs. The dS0s in UV CMRs follow a steeper sequence than dEs and show bluer UV–optical color at a given magnitude. We also find that the UV CMRs of dEs in the outer cluster region are slightly steeper than that of their counterparts in the inner region, due to the existence of faint, blue dEs in the outer region. We explore the observed CMRs with population models of a luminosity-dependent delayed exponential star formation history. We confirm that the feature of delayed star formation of early-type dwarf galaxies in the Virgo cluster is strongly correlated with their morphology and environment. The observed CMR of dS0s is well matched by models with relatively long delayed star formation. Our results suggest that dS0s are most likely transitional objects at the stage of subsequent transformation of late-type progenitors to ordinary red dEs in the cluster environment. In any case, UV photometry provides a powerful tool to disentangle the diverse subpopulations of early-type dwarf galaxies and uncover their evolutionary histories.
Improvement of Distribution and Osteogenic Differentiation of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells by Hyaluronic Acid and β-Tricalcium Phosphate-Coated Polymeric Scaffold In Vitro

Abstract Bone tissue engineering requires a well-designed scaffold that can be biodegradable, biocompatible, and support the stem cells to osteogenic differentiation. Porous polycaprolactone (PCL) scaffold prepared by fused deposition modeling is an attractive biomaterial that has been used in clinic. However, PCL scaffolds lack biological function and osteoinductivity. In this study, we functionalized the PCL scaffolds by embedding them with a matrix of hyaluronic acid/β-tricalcium phosphate (HA/TCP). Human mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) were cultured on scaffolds with and without coating to investigate proliferation and osteogenic differentiation. The DNA amount was significantly higher in the HA/TCP-coated scaffold on day 21. At the gene expression level, HA/TCP coating significantly increased the expression of ALP and COLI on day 4. These data correlated with the ALP activity peaking on day 7 in the HA/TCP-coated scaffold. Scanning electron microscope and histological analysis revealed that the cell matrix and calcium deposition were distributed more uniformly in the coated scaffolds compared to scaffolds without coating. In conclusion, the HA/TCP coating improved cellular proliferation, osteogenic differentiation, and uniform distribution of the cellular matrix in vitro. The HA/TCP-PCL scaffold holds great promise to accommodate human bone marrow-derived MSCs for bone reconstruction purposes, which warrants future in vivo studies.
A Dynamic Neural Field Model of Visual Working Memory and Change Detection

Efficient visually guided behavior depends on the ability to form, retain, and compare visual representations for objects that may be separated in space and time. This ability relies on a short-term form of memory known as visual working memory. Although a considerable body of research has begun to shed light on the neurocognitive systems subserving this form of memory, few theories have addressed these processes in an integrated, neurally plausible framework. We describe a layered neural architecture that implements encoding and maintenance, and links these processes to a plausible comparison process. In addition, the model makes the novel prediction that change detection will be enhanced when metrically similar features are remembered. Results from experiments probing memory for color and for orientation were consistent with this novel prediction. These findings place strong constraints on models addressing the nature of visual working memory and its underlying mechanisms.
Centrosome Hyperamplification Predicts Progression and Tumor Recurrence in Bladder Cancer

Purpose: Recent studies have reported that centrosome hyperamplification (CH) is closely related to chromosomal instability in bladder cancer. In this study, we investigated whether CH could be used as a prognostic biomarker for patients with bladder cancer. Experimental Design: CH was evaluated by immunohistochemistry in 50 bladder cancers (≤pT1: 43; ≥pT2: 7). In addition, numerical aberrations of chromosomes 7, 9, and 17 and gain of 20q13, on which the Aurora-A gene is located, were evaluated by fluorescence in situ hybridization, and DNA ploidy was assessed. Preliminary experiments on eight bladder cancer cell lines found that six had over 5% of CH cells associated with a gain of 20q13 and overexpression of Aurora-A; therefore, CH-positive cases (CH+) were defined as those having over 5% of cells with ≥3 centrosomes per cell. Results: CH+, 20q13 gain, chromosomal instability, and DNA aneuploidy were detected in 30 (60%), 18 (36%), 22 (44%), and 19 (38%) patients, respectively. There were significant differences in tumor number, grade, recurrence, and progression between the CH+ and CH− groups. The later had significantly higher recurrence-free and progression-free survivals than the former (P = 0.0028 and P = 0.0070, respectively, log-rank test). Multivariate analysis revealed that CH+ was the strongest predictor for tumor recurrence in nonmuscle invasive (pTa and pT1) bladder cancer (hazard ratio, 1.882; 95% confidence interval, 1.161–3.325; P = 0.0094). Conclusions: Detection of CH may provide crucial prognostic information about tumor recurrence in bladder cancer.
Energy-Aware Gossip Routing for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is a communication model for a node to emit the packets via wireless channels to its neighbor nodes. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), it is commonly implemented through flooding to find routes, send alarm signals and page a particular host. Conventional on-demand route discovery for ad hoc routing protocols, such as AODV, extensively use blind flooding which could result in a high number of redundant retransmissions, leading to serious contention and collisions, referred to as the broadcast storm problem. A gossip-based approach is proposed to alleviate this problem, in which each node forwards a message with some probability. This approach combines gossiping with AODV (denoted as AODV+G) and exhibits a significant performance improvement in simulations. In this paper, we improve the gossip-based approach by considering the remaining energy of nodes in the gossip mechanism (denoted as AODV+GE) to improve the lifetime of entire network and the packet delivery ratio. Through mathematical inference and simulations we show that AODV+GE outperform AODV+G in terms of the lifetime of whole network, average node energy consumption, and packet delivery ratio.
Karyotype rearrangements and telomere analysis in Myzus persicae (Hemiptera, Aphididae) strains collected on Lavandula sp. plants

Abstract Karyotype analysis of nine strains of the peach-potato aphid Myzus persicae (Sulzer, 1776), collected on Lavandula sp. plants, evidenced showed that five of them had a standard 2n = 12 karyotype, one possessed a fragmentation of the X chromosome occurring at the telomere opposite to the NOR-bearing one and three strains had a chromosome number 2n = 11 due to a non-reciprocal translocation of an autosome A3 onto an A1 chromosome. Interestingly, the terminal portion of the autosome A1 involved in the translocation was the same in all the three strains, as evidenced by FISH with the histone cluster as a probe. The study of telomeres in the Myzus persicae strain with the X fission evidenced that telomerase synthesised de novo telomeres at the breakpoints resulting in the stabilization of the chromosomal fragments. Lastly, despite the presence of a conserved telomerase, aphid genome is devoid of genes coding for shelterin, a complex of proteins involved in telomere functioning frequently reported as conserved in eukaryotes. The absence of this complex, also confirmed in the genome of other arthropods, suggests that the shift in the sequence of the telomeric repeats has been accompanied by other changes in the telomere components in arthropods in respect to other metazoans.
Microblogging Hash Tag Recommendation System Based on Semantic TF-IDF: Twitter Use Case

Limitation in the number of characters in microblogging systems, such as Twitter, forces users to use various terms for the same meaning, object, or concept. Sometimes the same term is used in a shorter form (e.g. #friend and #frnd) in a tweet. This problem makes finding similarities between such tags and their corresponding tweets harder. The classical text mining methods cannot be used efficiently in the short tweets. Thus tweets similarity and subsequently tag recommendation, as one of the problems in microblogging social networks, needs a new method with higher efficiency. In this paper we have defined a new semantic based method to find similarities among short messages. We have modeled each short message as a semantic vector which can be used along with any similarity method such as cosine similarity. Then we evaluated the accuracy of the new semantic similarity based tag recommendation system using various semantic based algorithms and compare their results. The semantic based algorithms used are: Shortest Path, Wu & Palmer, Lin, JiangConrath, Resnik, Lesk, LeacockChodorow, and Hirst-StOnge. Results are evaluated using 8396744 real English tweets and show around 6 times improvement in accuracy over normal TF-IDF.