Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parallel AlineaGA: An island parallel evolutionary algorithm for multiple sequence alignment

Multiple sequence alignment is the base of a growing number of Bioinformatics applications. This does not mean that the accuracy of the existing methods corresponds to biologically faultless alignments. Searching for the optimal alignment for a set of sequences is often hindered by the size and complexity of the search space. Parallel Genetic Algorithms are a class of stochastic algorithms which can increase the speed up of the algorithms. They also enhance the efficiency of the search and the robustness of the solutions by delivering results that are better than those provided by the sum of several sequential Genetic Algorithms. AlineaGA is an evolutionary method for solving protein multiple sequence alignment. It uses a Genetic Algorithm on which some of its genetic operators embed a simple local search optimization. We have implemented its parallel version which we now present. Comparing with its sequential version we have observed an improvement in the search for the best solution. We have also compared its performance with ClustalW2 and T-Coffee, observing that Parallel AlineaGA can lead the search for better solutions for the majority of the datasets in study.
Asymmetric ECC organization in 3D-memory via spare column utilization

3D-memory and processor-memory structures are promising applications of 3D-IC technology. With 3D integration, the effective density of memories can increase and the interconnect distance from processor to memory can be shortened. Due to their stacked structure, the upper dies behave as shields blocking outer particles from reaching lower dies, and it makes an error rate of the top layer largest among all layers. Therefore, it is important to improve reliability of upper dies in the 3D-ICs. A novel ECC scheme for 3D-memory to secure reliable operations by enhancing ECC capability of upper layer memories is introduced in this paper. The proposed scheme does not require additional redundancies. Instead, it utilizes unused spare columns of lower layer memories to store additional check-bits of upper layer memories. It forms an asymmetric ECC organization across different layers which enhances ECC capabilities in upper layers. Experimental results show that the proposed method can tolerate more than three times of a bit-error rate compared to the conventional method.
Operational Definitions of Expertise and Competence

The Problem and the Solution. The concept of human expertise is fundamental to the human resource practices Although exemplary performance can be clearly recognized in the actions of others, organizations lack a means of measuring expertise The need to quantify expertise is cntical to being able to manage and develop the organization's human capital effectively This chapter examines the basic characteristics of expertise and develops an operational definition of human expertise
Associations of C1q/TNF-Related Protein-9 Levels in Serum and Epicardial Adipose Tissue with Coronary Atherosclerosis in Humans

Objective. To investigate the correlation of CTRP9 with coronary atherosclerosis. Methods. Coronary angiography confirmed CAD in 241 patients (62 received CABG) and non-CAD in 121 (55 received valve replacement). Results. Serum levels of LDL-C, CRP, TNF-α, IL-6, and leptin in CAD patients were significantly higher than those in non-CAD patients (P < 0.05), but APN and CTRP9 were lower (P < 0.05). Serum levels of CTRP9 and APN were negatively related to BMI, HOMA-IR, TNF-α, IL-6, and leptin but positively to HDL-C (P < 0.05) in CAD patients. After adjustment of APN, CTRP9 was still related to the above parameters. Serum CTRP9 was a protective factor of CAD (P < 0.05). When compared with non-CAD patients, leptin mRNA expression increased dramatically, while CTRP9 mRNA expression reduced markedly in epicardial adipose tissue of CAD patients (P < 0.05). The leptin expression and macrophage count in CAD group were significantly higher than in non-CAD group, but CAD patients had a markedly lower CTRP9 expression (P < 0.05). Conclusions. Circulating and coronary CTRP9 plays an important role in the inflammation and coronary atherosclerosis of CAD patients. Serum CTRP9 is an independent protective factor of CAD.
Feasibility of common bibliometrics in evaluating translational science

Introduction A pilot study by 6 Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs) explored how bibliometrics can be used to assess research influence. Methods Evaluators from 6 institutions shared data on publications (4202 total) they supported, and conducted a combined analysis with state-of-the-art tools. This paper presents selected results based on the tools from 2 widely used vendors for bibliometrics: Thomson Reuters and Elsevier. Results Both vendors located a high percentage of publications within their proprietary databases (>90%) and provided similar but not equivalent bibliometrics for estimating productivity (number of publications) and influence (citation rates, percentage of papers in the top 10% of citations, observed citations relative to expected citations). A recently available bibliometric from the National Institutes of Health Office of Portfolio Analysis, examined after the initial analysis, showed tremendous potential for use in the CTSA context. Conclusion Despite challenges in making cross-CTSA comparisons, bibliometrics can enhance our understanding of the value of CTSA-supported clinical and translational research.
The Making of “Transgenic Spermatozoa”1

Abstract The processes of making transgenic animals by microinjecting DNA into the pronucleus of a fertilized oocyte or after the transfection of embryonic stem cells are now well established. However, attempts have also been made, with varying degrees of success, to use spermatozoa as a vector for transgenesis in mammals and other vertebrates during the last decade. A number of different approaches for making transgenic spermatozoa have been developed. These include directly incubating mature, isolated spermatozoa with DNA or pretreating mature, isolated spermatozoa before assisted fertilization. Microinjection procedures have also been established to transfect male germ cells directly in vivo within the seminiferous tubules or to reimplant previously isolated male germ cells submitted to in vitro transfection into a recipient testis. The latter two techniques present the advantage of being able to create transgenic progeny simply by mating with wild-type females, which avoids the possibility of interference or damage as a result of assisted fertilization or the manipulation of embryos. The different aspects of sperm-mediated transgenesis are presented.
Professional Development on Multiple Literacies in an Urban Professional Development School

Abstract This is a narrative report of a three-year professional development effort taking place within a professional development school (PDS). University professors collaborated with teachers in an urban junior high school to work on broadening their conceptions of literacy to enable student success. At the end of the project, it was clear that the ‘professional development’ was just as profound for the university professors as it was for the teachers.
No Association between Gastroesophageal Reflux and Cancers of the Larynx and Pharynx

Purpose: To examine the proposed relation between gastroesophageal reflux disease and cancers of the larynx and pharynx. Experimental Design: A cohort of 66,965 patients with discharge diagnoses of heartburn, hiatal hernia, or esophagitis was identified in the Swedish Inpatient Register. We observed a total of 376,622 person-years in the cohort. Identification of laryngeal and pharyngeal cancers was achieved through the Swedish Cancer Register. Standardized incidence ratios, the ratio of the observed to the expected number of cancers, derived from the general Swedish population and adjusted for sex, age, and calendar year, was used to estimate the relative risk. Results: During follow-up, 30 cases of laryngeal and 31 cases of pharyngeal cancer were detected in the cohort. Slightly increased risks of laryngeal [relative risk, 1.6; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.1-2.2] and pharyngeal carcinomas (relative risk, 1.9; 95% CI, 1.3-2.8) were observed in the total reflux cohort. After stratification to exclude cohort members with a diagnosis of alcoholism, no significant increase in the risk of laryngeal (relative risk, 1.3; 95% CI, 0.8-2.0) or pharyngeal carcinomas (relative risk, 1.0; 95% CI, 0.5-1.6) was found compared with the general population. Furthermore, there were no dose-response patterns of the risk for laryngeal and pharyngeal cancers with years of cohort follow-up, indicators of reflux severity, or specificity of reflux diagnosis. Conclusion: This study provides no evidence in support of the proposed association between gastroesophageal reflux disease and cancers of the larynx or pharynx.
In Their Own Words: New Labour Women and the Substantive Representation of Women

Political representation is an essentially contested concept. Contemporary feminist conceptions claim a link between the presence of women and the potential for a feminised transformation of politics. Previous empirical research in the UK, which examined the question of women representatives' attitudes, concluded that women representatives were attitudinally more liberal/feminist than male representatives. This article extends the existing literature through a consideration of how the new intake of Labour women MPs conceptualise political representation. Three different dimensions are explored. First, the article examines constituency-level representation focusing upon the women MPs' perceptions of shared identity, affinity and their relationships with women constituents. Secondly, the question of whether women representatives perceive that women's presence will effect a feminisation within parliament by regendering the political agenda is considered. Finally, the impact of women representatives' presence in and on government is examined in relation to the women representatives' understanding of the role of the minister for women. The research suggests that the new-intake Labour women MPs acknowledge a feminised dimension to political representation, albeit a secondary one. This supports, in a qualified way, theoretical and empirical arguments that women's presence in politics has the potential to transform women's political representation.
A Meta-Analysis of Relationships between Ad-Evoked Feelings and Advertising Responses

The authors conduct meta-analyses of relationships involving positive and negative ad-evoked feelings to determine (1) whether the effects of positive and negative feelings on advertising responses are symmetrical or asymmetrical and bipolar or bidimensional; (2) whether study design characteristics influence the strength of effects of positive and negative feelings on ad and brand attitudes; (3) whether moderator effects are differential for positive and negative feelings; and (4) whether relationships are generalizable across different study designs, product types, and media. Using the aggregated data, the authors assess competing predictions of three alternative theoretical perspectives: bipolarity, generalized asymmetry, and contingent asymmetry. Analyses indicate that positive and negative feelings have contingently asymmetrical effects on advertising responses. Study conditions related to subjects’ cognitive processing sets moderated the effects of negative feelings on ad and brand attitudes but generally did not moderate the effects of positive feelings. The authors also demonstrate the utility of bootstrapping as an advantageous new way of conducting moderator analyses in meta-analysis.
Beneficiary Survey-Based Feedback on New Medicare Informational Materials

In response to the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) initiated a massive information and education campaign to promote effective health plan decisionmaking. Early results suggest that the pilot version of the Medicare & You handbook and other new Medicare informational materials were viewed favorably overall. Despite their limitations, most beneficiaries found the information useful. The longer, more comprehensive materials were not perceived to be more useful than the shorter, less complicated version. Additional research is needed to determine which subgroups of beneficiaries may need more and, possibly less, information.
Perceptions of Discrimination During Downsizing

Effects of layoffs on employees—both stayers and leavers—have been studied extensively, but very little research has been conducted on layoff effects on ethnically diverse employee populations nor on discrimination during layoffs. This case study begins with a set of interviews to uncover employee perceptions of ethnic discrimination during a “voluntary” downsizing process. Themes identified in the interviews include issues that co-occur with complaints of ethnic discrimination: perceptions of selection fairness and information accessibility. A subsequent survey examines the relationships between ethnic discrimination and these two variables. Results of the study demonstrate that perceptions of ethnic discrimination are moderately correlated with perceptions of selection fairness and information access during the layoff process. Also, in the company examined, both minority and majority ethnic group members felt equally discriminated against. Findings are discussed in light of current research on the continuing lack of upward mobility for minority employees and implications for layoff planning.
LGBQ-Specific Elderly Housing as a “Sparkling Sanctuary”: Boundary Work on LGBQ Identity and Community in Relationship to Potential LGBQ-Specific Elderly Housing in Sweden

ABSTRACT This study explored how boundaries in relationship to community and identity were created and negotiated among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) people within the framework of picturing LGBQ-specific elderly housing as a housing alternative in older age, by applying focus group methodology. “An island as a sparkling sanctuary” was identified as a metaphor for how symbolic resources defining the LGBQ community can be manifested in LGBQ-specific qualities of elderly housing. The boundary work underlying this manifestation included elaborations on the dilemma between exclusiveness and normality. The findings illustrate further how symbolic resources and collective identities were developed through dialectic interplay between internal and external definitions. Further, the findings show how boundary work generated shared feelings of similarity and group membership. The associated symbolic and social resources not only served to deal with difficult situations but also to manifest LGBQ identity and sense of community as a “gold medal. ”
Digital rectal examinations and prostate cancer screening: attitudes of African American men.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To explore the relationship between attitudes toward digital rectal examination (DRE) and participation in prostate cancer screening among African American men. DESIGN Survey. SETTING Prostate cancer screenings with a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test held at churches with African American members in Detroit, MI. SAMPLE 613 African American men between the ages of 40 and 70. METHODS Self-administered, structured questionnaires examining attitudes toward DRE, past experiences with DRE, and fear of cancer. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Willingness to undergo DRE. FINDINGS The majority of men who were screened had positive attitudes about DRE. Fear of cancer was associated with negative attitudes toward DRE. DREs were not a deterrent among men who attended the screenings. CONCLUSION Negative attitudes toward DRE do not necessarily deter African American men from participating in prostate cancer screenings. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING PRACTICE Prostate cancer screening programs should attempt to use both DRE and PSA. More reliable prostate cancer indicators are obtained by incorporating DRE with PSA tests.
Deep Convolutional Decision Jungle for Image Classification

We propose a novel method called deep convolutional decision jungle (CDJ) and its learning algorithm for image classification. The CDJ maintains the structure of standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs), i.e. multiple layers of multiple response maps fully connected. Each response map-or node-in both the convolutional and fully-connected layers selectively respond to class labels s.t. each data sample travels via a specific soft route of those activated nodes. The proposed method CDJ automatically learns features, whereas decision forests and jungles require pre-defined feature sets. Compared to CNNs, the method embeds the benefits of using data-dependent discriminative functions, which better handles multi-modal/heterogeneous data; further,the method offers more diverse sparse network responses, which in turn can be used for cost-effective learning/classification. The network is learnt by combining conventional softmax and proposed entropy losses in each layer. The entropy loss,as used in decision tree growing, measures the purity of data activation according to the class label distribution. The back-propagation rule for the proposed loss function is derived from stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization of CNNs. We show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public image classification benchmarks and one face verification dataset. We also demonstrate the use of auxiliary data labels, when available, which helps our method to learn more discriminative routing and representations and leads to improved classification.
Phonological awareness, spelling and reading abilities in Spanish‐speaking children

The relationship between phonological awareness, spelling and reading abilities was studied comparing first grade (N=39) Spanish-speaking skilled and less skilled readers' performance on three measures: phoneme segmentation, word spelling and word reading. Results showed that skilled readers performed at ceiling on the three tasks, whereas less skilled readers had a better performance on spelling than on reading, and most of them reached segmentation criterion in the phonological awareness task. Performance on this task was significantly correlated with word spelling, while no association was found between phoneme segmentation and word reading. The less skilled readers could spell many words they could not read, and children in both groups spelled most of the words in a conventional way. It is agreed that certain characteristics of Spanish phonetic structure — small number of vowels, simple syllabic structure — and the relative transparency of its orthography may account for the early development of phonemic segmentation skills and allow the mastery of sound-letter correspondence rules that is reflected in good spelling performance.
Machine-Learning-Based Adaptive Approach for Frame-Size Optimization in Wireless LAN Environments

The performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) is affected by the channel conditions of wireless medium and the contention processes of wireless stations. Under these effects, it is feasible to adjust the frame size to maximize the throughput. The majority of existing frame-size optimization solutions are based on the assumption that the optimal frame size only depends on the channel conditions. These approaches do not consider the contention effects, thus leading to suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we tackle the frame-size optimization problem using a machine-learning-based adaptive approach. This approach takes both the channel conditions and the contention effect into consideration. In this approach, each source station performs the throughput measurement and collects the ldquoframe size-throughputrdquo patterns. The collected patterns contain the knowledge about the effects of channel conditions and contention processes. Based on these patterns, our approach uses neural networks to accurately model the throughput as a function with respect to the frame size. After the knowledge building, we obtain the gradient information to adjust the frame size. The main contribution of this paper is that we take both the channel conditions and the contention effect into consideration, without any assumptions of the channel models or the stations' behavior that are required by the previous analytical solutions. We perform comprehensive simulations to validate that the proposed approach can effectively optimize the frame size under various channel conditions and contention effects. We also implement the proposed approach and perform comprehensive experiments on a real testbed to evaluate the effectiveness and reaction speed of the proposed approach in practice.
Mirrors, Minds, and Metaphors

As most scholars of classical Chinese philosophy are well aware, the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi both make use of the metaphor of the heart-mind (xin j\j) as a mirror. For Zhuangzi, a heart-mind like a mirror constitutes the ? deal state of unity with the Way: "The sage's heart-mind in stillness is the mirror of Heaven and earth, the glass of the ten thousand things. "1 For Xunzi, one must have a heart-mind like a mirror in order to learn about the Way. Just as a pan of water can be "clear and pure enough to see your beard and eyebrows and to examine the lines on your face," so, too, can the heart-mind be clear and pure enough to respond appropriately to learning.2 A num ber of scholars have discussed the significance of the mirror metaphor in these and other Chinese texts.3 It may be of particular interest to comparative philosophers that the mirror metaphor is not confined to the Chinese tradition. Soren Kierkegaard is one example of a Western philosopher who used this metaphor, maintaining that the properly attuned heart "mirrors" the Good: "As the sea mirrors the elevation of heaven in its pure depths, so may the heart when it is calm and deeply transparent mirror the divine elevation of the Good in its pure depths. "4 Richard Rorty, too, makes use of the mirror metaphor in his work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, arguing that "The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations? some accurate, some not? and capable of being studied by pure, non-empirical methods. "5 What should comparative philosophers learn from the shared use of metaphors across different cultural and philosophical traditions? In his recent work, Edward Slingerland suggests that the shared use of metaphors across different cultural, philo sophical, and religious contexts points toward deeper similarities between what may at first appear to be contrasting views.6 In this article, by comparing the mirror met aphor in Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Kierkegaard, and Rorty, I argue that a properly contex tualized comparison of different uses of a metaphor sometimes uncovers more differ ences than similarities between philosophical views. I begin by discussing the uses of the mirror metaphor in the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi. I then turn to the uses of the metaphor in the work of Kierkegaard and Rorty, focusing on what makes their understanding of the mirror metaphor distinctively Western, thereby marking a con trast to Chinese understandings. In the final part of this article I discuss Slingerland's suggestion that shared metaphors indicate deeper similarities between views, and I show how the foregoing comparative analysis constitutes a counterexample to his view. I aim to show that an analysis of different understandings of the same meta phor is one way of coming to appreciate features of cultural, philosophical, and religious views that might otherwise be overlooked, but that these features are