Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sex and congenital malformations: An international perspective

The study evaluated the sex distribution of major isolated malformations and common trisomies among a large and geographically varied sample. Eighteen registries from 24 countries contributed cases, which were centrally reviewed and classified in three clinical types as isolated, associated, or syndromic. We selected cases of 26 major defects (n = 108,534); trisomy 21, 18, and 13 (n = 30,114); other syndromes (n = 2,898); and multiple congenital anomalies (n = 24,197), for a total of 165,743 cases. We observed a significant deviation of sex distribution (compared to a sex ratio of 1.06 or male proportion of 51.4%) for 24 of the 29 groups (a male excess in 16, a female excess in 8), and in 8 of such groups these estimates varied significantly across registries. A male excess was noted for two left obstructive cardiac defects (hypoplastic left heart and coarctation of the aorta) and a female excess for all the main types of neural tube defects. A male excess was seen for omphalocele but not gastroschisis. For neural tube defects the female excess tended to be stronger in areas with historically high prevalence for these defects. For 15 of the 26 birth defects the sex distribution differed among isolated, associated, and syndromic cases. Some of these epidemiologic commonalities are consistent with known or putative developmental processes. Further, the geographic variation for some defects may reflect local prevalence rates and risk factors. Finally, the findings underscore the need for clinical classification (e.g., into isolated, multiple, syndromes) in studies of birth defects. Published 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
THE EFFECTS OF APPLYING GAME-BASED LEARNING TO WEBCAM MOTION SENSOR GAMES FOR AUTISTIC STUDENTS' SENSORY INTEGRATION TRAINING

This study aims to explore the effects of applying game-based learning to webcam motion sensor games for autistic students’ sensory integration training for autistic students. The research participants were three autistic students aged from six to ten. Webcam camera as the research tool wad connected internet games to engage in motion sensor games. Through the motion sensor games, the researchers were able to collect data from physiological monitoring, observation (including sensory integration observation and process observation), and interviews. The findings of the study reveal that: (1) the teacher and the participants possess positive attitude toward applying webcam motion sensor games to sensory integration training; (2) Webcam motion sensor games can enhance autistic students’ learning interest; and (3) applying the game-based learning to webcam motion sensor games can improve the effect of autistic students’ muscle training and endurance. 1. RESEARCH MOTIVES AND PURPOSES According to the Ministry of Interior (2011), the census data on the numbers of physical or mentally disabled people show that there were 11,211 autistic patients in Taiwan, and the autism was in second place (4,118 people) among 6 to 11 year old students with physical and mental disabilities. Since autistic patients have difficulty in interpersonal interaction, some people call them “star students. ” Up-to-date, there is no single method that can fully cure autistic students. In traditional training methods, many game methods are carried out by teachers in individual instruction, learners still cannot actively participate in learning, resulting in shortened learning time, lowered learning intentions, insufficient training obtained by learners, and poor levels of accommodation. Also, current developed methods include drugs, educational therapy, art therapy, and associated new supportive methods of treatments. Among them, the sensory integration training is a very important method of learning in educational therapy. Yu (2006) proposed that the sensory integration training can make up for the shortcomings of brain function, enhance the coordination between senses and perceptions, improve the physical growth and development, and establish the foundation for abilities needed in later social life, which allows autistic patients to exercise and engage in limb training, elicit vestibular sensation, tactile senses, and stimulation to the individual, achieving the purpose of coordinated development of feelings and perceptions. Additionally, recent development in advanced technology has led information technology to produce support systems, so that training methods have become more diverse. Also, rapid development in human-machine interfaces has produced many new products, such as touchscreens, voice-controlled systems, eyeball tracking systems, and so on. Among them, the motion sensor games, such as wii and kinect have also been developed to make human-machine interfaces highly popular. The concept of game-based learning has constantly been
Isolation of enterotoxigenic Bacteroides fragilis from humans with diarrhea

Enterotoxigenic Bacteroides fragilis was isolated from stool specimens of 8 of 44 diarrheic individuals (ages, 4 months to 69 years). The individuals had watery diarrhea and intestinal cramping; and infants had hyperthermia, vomiting, and blood in the stools. No recognized enteric pathogens were detected in seven of the eight diarrheic individuals positive for enterotoxigenic B. fragilis. The bacterium produced an enterotoxin detectable in concentrated broth that supported bacterial growth. Fifteen adult rabbits with ligated ceca developed fatal enteric disease following intraileal injection with 5 x 10(9) CFU of enterotoxigenic B. fragilis. Conversely, eight control rabbits injected with nonenterotoxigenic B. fragilis remained clinically normal. As few as 5 x 10(3) CFU of enterotoxigenic B. fragilis caused fatal enteric disease in the rabbit model. Disease in rabbits was characterized by mucoid, often hemorrhagic, diarrhea. The bacterium colonized the caudal small intestine and the colon of the rabbits and caused moderate to severe necrotizing colitis. Enterotoxigenic B. fragilis is widespread in the intestinal tract of diarrheic humans and is enteropathogenic in adult rabbits with ligated ceca. Its possible role in the enteric disease complex merits further study.
Managing role stress through emotional intelligence: a study of Indian medico professionals

The study was designed to investigate the relationship as well as the impact of Emotional Intelligence (EI) on to the perception of role stress of medical professionals in their organisational lives. It was conducted on a sample size of 312 medical professionals consisting of 174 male and 138 female doctors working for privately managed professional hospital organisations. The findings of the study indicate no significant difference in the level of EI and perceived role stress between genders, but significantly negative relationships of EI with organisational role stress for both the gender and the medical professionals as a whole. The study also found EI of both the gender and the medical professionals as a whole to predict significant amount of variance in the total variance in their perceived role stress. The findings of the study have been discussed and interpreted in the light of research findings of other researchers. The findings of the study have got important in academic as well as practical implications and that have been clearly stated. The authors hope that the findings of the study will provide much more respite to the HR professionals of hospital organisations in India to effectively manage the medical professionals.
“Express the Real You”

Prior research shows that people feel authentic when they express themselves. In this research, we examined how people from different cultures make inferences about a target person’s authenticity based on information about that person’s self-expression. Our cultural-fit hypothesis proposes that acts of self-expression enhance perceptions of authenticity when they are congruent with the culturally prevalent self-expression norms. In an experiment with Germans and Chinese reading scenarios and making inferences about a hypothetical person, we found that authenticity judgments were the highest, when the target person’s self-expression matched the culturally valued self-expression style—that is, expressing both likes and dislikes in Germany, and expressing only likes but no dislikes in China. Moreover, we found that the interactive effect of self-expression and culture had downstream effects on information processing, such that in the case of counter-cultural self-expression practices participants were more likely to seek information that would compensate for this cultural incongruence.
Vergence Transient Component: An Index to Oculomotor Learning Modification

The brain has a dynamic ability to change or adapt which is imperative for survival of a species. Research has shown that the dynamics of disparity vergence eye movements, the inward (convergence) or outward (divergence) turning of the eyes, are malleable and depend to some extent on the amplitude of preceding stimuli. Disparity convergence is composed of two components. The transient component is open loop and accounts for the system's speed; whereas the sustained component is assumed to be feedback controlled allowing the system to be very accurate. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the modification of convergence eye movements was a function of the magnitude of the subject's transient component. An experimental session consisted of three phases: baseline, modification, and recovery. The baseline and recovery phases used only 4deg step test stimuli. The modification phase consisted of a 4deg test randomly intermixed with a larger conditioning double step or step ramp stimulus presented in a 1:5 ratio. Eight subjects participated. Independent component analysis was used to decompose the vergence responses into the transient and sustained components. Results show the magnitude of the transient component is an indicator for the amount of dynamic change observed during the modification phase, R = 0.88.
Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS

This case study illustrates the potential benefits and risks associated with the migration of an IT system in the oil & gas industry from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2 from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives across the enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial and technical analysis offered by providers. Our results show that the system infrastructure in the case study would have cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2, and using cloud computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the support calls for this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for a migration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder impact analysis revealed that there are significant risks associated with this. Whilst the benefits of using the cloud are attractive, we argue that it is important that enterprise decision-makers consider the overall organizational implications of the changes brought about with cloud computing to avoid implementing local optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.
The Interplay between Scientific Overlap and Cooperation and the Resulting Gain in Co-Authorship Interactions

Considering the importance of scientific interactions, understanding the principles that govern fruitful scientific research is crucial to policy makers and scientists alike. The outcome of an interaction is to a large extent dependent on the balancing of contradicting motivations accompanying the establishment of collaborations. Here, we assembled a dataset of nearly 20,000 publications authored by researchers affiliated with ten top universities. Based on this data collection, we estimated the extent of different interaction types between pairwise combinations of researchers. We explored the interplay between the overlap in scientific interests and the tendency to collaborate, and associated these estimates with measures of scientific quality and social accessibility aiming at studying the typical resulting gain of different interaction patterns. Our results show that scientists tend to collaborate more often with colleagues with whom they share moderate to high levels of mutual interests and knowledge while cooperative tendency declines at higher levels of research-interest overlap, suggesting fierce competition, and at the lower levels, suggesting communication gaps. Whereas the relative number of alliances dramatically differs across a gradient of research overlap, the scientific impact of the resulting articles remains similar. When considering social accessibility, we find that though collaborations between remote researchers are relatively rare, their quality is significantly higher than studies produced by close-circle scientists. Since current collaboration patterns do not necessarily overlap with gaining optimal scientific quality, these findings should encourage scientists to reconsider current collaboration strategies.
Reference-Dependent Preferences and the Allocation of Effort over Time: Evidence from Natural Experi

Seal bracket and spacer construction for mounting track rollers of a crawler tractor. Brackets are provided which not only carry seals between track rollers and their shafts as well as mount the shafts on side members, but also aid in maintaining the side members in spaced relation to one another. To this end, upwardly projecting extensions on the brackets and a longitudinal plate are provided. The longitudinal plate is the back up member against the top ends of the bracket extensions and is welded at intervals to the side members, to which members the brackets are secured, and which members are secured to the tractor body by gage bars.
Softening and instability of natural slopes in highly fissured plastic clay shales

Abstract. Softening is often considered to be the main cause of first-time slides in OC clay, but so far the mechanics of softening has not been satisfactorily explained. Bearing on laboratory data and field observations about landslides in tectonized highly plastic clay shales of Italian Apennines, the paper describes a process of soil weakening that could explain some failures of natural slopes.
Student pathways at the university: patterns and predictors of completion

This article outlines a longitudinal pathway analysis of student performance within educational institutions, so as to identify student profiles which describe those groups of students who are more likely to complete or leave a bachelor degree program, and to identify the predictors for these outcomes. The analyses are based on 7314 undergraduate student enrolment and completion data, covering the period from 2001 to 2005, from a large metropolitan New Zealand university. A prospective approach was used to describe the pathway outcomes of students after every academic year in the program; thus, student pathway outcomes for any particular year were developed based on the student’s status in the following year. The effects of demographic characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, socio‐economic status, age and achievement on university entry examinations on student’s pathways outcomes are minor, once achievement and study‐related factors are controlled. The intensity of study, students’ progress toward completion of total point requirements for the program, grade point average and field of study were the important predictors of different pathway outcomes for students. It is suggested that this study significantly contributes to the existing knowledge by establishing a robust methodology for longitudinal pathway analysis of student performance within educational institutions.
Meanings for Closeness and Intimacy in Friendship

Closeness and intimacy are fundamental, but poorly defined, concepts in the study of personal relationships. We sought to contribute to a more precise understanding of closeness and intimacy by first examining participants' meanings for closeness in friendships, and then by comparing meanings for closeness with participants' meanings for intimacy. In a self-report survey 270 college students were asked what made their same-sex and cross-sex friendships close and how close-ness was expressed. Thirteen different meanings for close-ness were derived. Individuals assigned an average of three meanings for closeness, with the most common being self-disclosure, support, shared interests and explicit expression of the value of the relationship. Native meanings for closeness differed relatively little across sexes and relational types. Respondents envisioned three possible relationships between closeness and intimacy. Just under half the respondents appeared to view them as equivalent terms, while the remaining respondents emphasized either qualitative or quantitative differences. The chief qualitative difference was that intimacy implied a romantic or sexual dimension to about one quarter of the respondents. Quantitative differences generally took the form of believing that an intimate relationship was a more intense form of a close relationship. Closeness appeared to be a richer, more inclusive term than intimacy. Respondents generated more meanings for it and thought of a greater variety of relationships as close. There were fewer sex differences in meanings for closeness than in meanings for intimacy.
Fast visual object counting via example-based density estimation

Density estimation based visual object counting (DE-VOC) methods estimate the counts of an image by integrating over its predicted density map. They perform effectively but inefficiently. This paper proposes a fast DE-VOC method but maintains its effectiveness. Essentially, the feature space of image patches from VOC can be clustered into subspaces, and the examples of each subspace can be collected to learn its embedding. Also, it is assumed that the neighborhood embeddings of image patches and their corresponding density maps generated from training images are similar. With these principles, a closed form DE-VOC algorithm is derived, where the embedding and centroid of each neighborhood are precomputed by the training samples. Consequently, the density map of a given patch is estimated by simple classification and mapping. Experimental results show that our proposed method is comparable with mainstream ones on counting accuracy while running much faster in testing phase.
Modeling Value Speculation: An Optimal Edge Selection Problem

Techniques for value speculation have been proposed for dynamically scheduled and statically scheduled machines to increase instruction-level parallelism (ILP) by breaking flow (true) dependences and allowing value-dependent operations to be executed speculatively. The effectiveness of value speculation depends upon the ability to select and break dependences to shorten overall execution time, while encountering penalties for value misprediction. To understand and improve the techniques for value speculation, we model value speculation as an optimal edge selection problem. The optimal edge selection problem involves finding a minimal set of edges (dependences) to break in a data dependence graph that achieves maximal benefits from value speculation, while taking the penalties for value misprediction into account. Based on three properties observed from the optimal edge selection problem, an efficient optimal edge selection algorithm is designed. From the experimental results of running the optimal edge selection algorithm for the 20 most heavily executed paths selected from each SPECint95 benchmark, several insights are shown. The average critical path reduction is 9.61 percent on an average and 25.57 percent at its maximum. Surprisingly, 66 percent of the edges selected by the optimal algorithm have value prediction accuracies over 99 percent. Moreover, most of the selected edges cross the middle of the data dependence graph. The selected producer operations thereby tend to reside in the upper portion of the data dependence graph, while the selected consumer operations appear toward the lower portion.
The Combination of Last Planner System and Location-Based Management System

Research Question: The Last Planner System (LPS) and Location-Based Management System (LBMS) both aim to achieve the lean goals of decreasing waste, increasing productivity and decreasing variability. Q1: How to best link these two systems together to achieve better project performance? Q2: can the LBMS control mechanisms be integrated with LPS? Q3: Can phase pull scheduling be integrated with LBMS? Purpose: The purpose of this research is to develop a process and best practices to combine the benefits of LPS and LBMS. Research Method: Skanska Finland has used LPS and LBMS together. Because the planning and controlling methods in different industries can vary, a series of workshops was conducted at a hospital project on the US West Coast, and three other US companies were interviewed, to discover the factors specific to industries where activity-based scheduling systems dominate. These three sources of information were combined to the latest case study results on the stand-alone use of LBMS and LPS. Findings: The paper proposes processes to integrate LPS and LBMS in pre-bid master scheduling, pull phase scheduling, look-ahead scheduling, and weekly planning. Limitations: The proposed processes need to be tested in practice. Implications: The hypotheses for future research are that after implementing the proposed process, H1: schedule conformance will improve, H2: project durations will shrink, H3: productivity will increase, and H4: cascading delay chains will show a decrease. Value for practitioners: General Contractors or Construction Managers can begin to use the proposed processes in order to decrease durations and increase productivity.
Illusions of a Good Grade

This study assessed the relationships among the accuracy of grade predictions, actual grades, self-enhancement bias, and attributions about academic performance. As a group, students anticipated higher grades than were earned. Individual differences in self-enhancement bias were measured using the discrepancy between anticipated and attained grades. This self-enhancement bias was negatively correlated with effort attributions and positively correlated with luck attributions. Students with higher American college testing (ACT) scores made more accurate predictions of their actual grades, demonstrating less self-enhancement bias. Students with the highest risk of performing poorly in class (lower ACT scores) were at greatest risk of overestimating grades, assumed external attributions for grade attainment, and were less likely to adopt positive learning strategies. Implications for teaching are discussed.
The expatriation experience of the Chinese spouse in New Zealand

This study examines the adjustment process and the adaptability of the Chinese migrant spouses’ in Auckland, New Zealand. A total of 97 spouses participated in a survey from a random sample of 200. The results suggest that both anticipatory and in‐country experiences are relevant to adjustment. The results of the study, specifically suggest that the adjustment process experienced by the Chinese spouses in the New Zealand environment is based on a number of factors such as (1) the amount of information and knowledge of New Zealand they have prior to arrival in New Zealand, (2) the backgrounds of the spouses, (3) their experiences prior to and on arrival in New Zealand, and (4) their ability to cope in the new environment.
Nonwork Participation and Work Attitudes: A Test of Scarcity vs. Expansion Models of Personal Resources

Participation in nonwork domains can be assumed either to rob work of resources, such as time, energy, and commitment, or to enrich resources available for work. This study provides support for the latter view. Both organizational commitment and job satisfaction correlated positively with the hours spent in, and the resources provided by, certain nonwork activities. Furthermore, the nonwork factors contributed significantly to several predictive equations of the work attitudes after the effects of common work-related correlates were controlled. Specific implications for human resources management are discussed.