Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-cultural promotional competence: a comparison of student and DMO marketing text

ABSTRACT This paper considers whether an inductive, collaborative information and communication technology-based approach to learning promotional language may help non-native English speakers produce destination material that can be effective in a real-world context. At a Japanese university, tourism communication students collected examples of professional language from the web in a shared database which they subsequently consulted in producing domestic destination websites in English. Text written by students for a destination was compared in a survey to text from an official English website for the destination. The survey measured the reaction of potential tourists in terms of trust in accuracy, expectations of service, and destination interest. Results indicate that the student material engendered stronger overall destination image, based on source credibility, interest in travel to the destination, and higher service expectations. The study considers implications of the results in terms of the effect of writing quality on destination image, and argues for the importance of cross-cultural marketing competence in tourism education.
Gait analysis of a human walker wearing robot feet as shoes

This work takes part in the project of development of an anthropomorphic biped robot, Bip. The technological construction has been completed and the robot has performed some slow static walks. The next stage is the implementation of fast and dynamic walking gaits, in other words anthropomorphic gaits. The robot feet have been designed with a three-axes force-moment sensor for reconstructing the center of pressure-zero moment point. To study and test these feet, the idea is simple: the experimental setup consists of a human walker wearing the Bip feet as shoes, a force-plate and a motion analysis system. The purpose is double. The first one is aimed at comparing the contact pressure forces reconstructed with the Bip sensor feet, with the data recorded by the force-plate. The second one consists in determining the influence of (relatively) heavy and rigid metallic shoes on the gait of a human walker. If these feet were proving to be a handicap for efficient and elegant human walking gaits, how could it be any different for the robot Bip? Fortunately the analysis shows that they do not really handicap the walker.
Seoul virus in patients and rodents from Beijing, China.

Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is a significant public health problem with an increasing incidence in Beijing, China (report of disease surveillance from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of Beijing, China). Hantaviruses were detected using RT-PCR method in blood samples of HFRS patients and lung tissues of rodents captured in Beijing. Phylogenetic analyses of 724bp partial S segment of the hantavirus gene showed that the detected Seoul virus (SEOV) fell into three different lineages, two of which circulated in Beijing. A nucleotide sequence identity of 99.7% for one of the cases of HFRS--the human- and Rattus norvegicus-originated SEOV sequences--had only two silent substitutions, suggesting genetic analysis is an essential tool for "case-investigation. "
DOWN-UP ALGEBRAS

Down-up algebras A = A(α, β, γ) were introduced by G. Benkart and T. Roby to better understand the structure of certain posets. In this paper, we prove that β 6= 0 is equivalent to A being right (or left) Noetherian, and also to A being a domain. Furthermore, when this occurs, we show that A is Auslander-regular and has global dimension 3. §
Acoustics-only based automatic phonetic baseform generation

Phonetic baseforms are the basic recognition units in most speech recognition systems. These baseforms are usually determined by linguists once a vocabulary is chosen and not modified thereafter. However, several applications, such as name dialing, require the user be able to add new words to the vocabulary. These new words are often names, or task-specific jargon, that have user-specific pronunciations. This paper describes a novel method for generating phonetic transcriptions (baseforms) of words based on acoustic evidence alone. It does not require either the spelling or any prior acoustic representation of the new word, is vocabulary independent, and does not have any linguistic constraints (pronunciation rules). Our experiments demonstrate the high decoding accuracies obtained when baseforms deduced using this approach are incorporated into our speech recognizer. Also, the error rates on the added words were found to be comparable to or better than when the baseforms were derived by hand.
Spectral Functions on Jordan Algebras: Differentiability and Convexity Properties

A spectral function on a formally real Jordan algebra is a real-valued function which depends only on the eigenvalues of its argument. One convenient way to create them is to start from a function f : Rexp.r [arrow] R which is symmetric in the components of its argument, and to define the function F(u) := f([delta](u)) where [delta](u) is the vector of eigenvalues of u. In this paper, we show that this construction preserves a number of properties which are frequently used in the framework of convex optimization: differentiability, convexity properties and Lipschitz continuity of the gradient for the Euclidean norm with the same constant as for f.
Towards radar-enabled sensor networks

Ultra wideband radar-enabled wireless sensor networks have the potential to address key detection and classification requirements common to many surveillance and tracking applications. However, traditional radar signal processing techniques are mismatched with the limited computational and storage resources available on typical sensor nodes. The mismatch is exacerbated in noisy, cluttered environments or when the signals have corrupted spectra. To explore the compatibility of ultra wideband radar and mote-class sensor nodes, we designed and built a new platform called the radar mote. An early prototype of this platform was used to detect, classify, and track people and vehicles moving through an outdoor sensor network deployment. This paper describes the sensor's theory of operation, discusses the design and implementation of the radar mote, and presents sample signal waveforms of people, vehicles, noise, and clutter. We demonstrate that radar sensors can be successfully integrated with mote-class devices and imbue them with an extraordinarily useful sensing modality
School Suspension and Academic Achievement for Tenth and Eleventh Grade Male Students: A Correlational Study

The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between absenteeism due to suspensions and math and reading scores from the 2016 – 2017 Georgia Milestones Test for tenth and eleventh grade regular education, male students. The focus of this study was on determining if math and reading scores on standardized tests could be predicted by the number of days missed from school due to suspensions using a bivariate regression. A total of 93 male high school students in grades ten and eleven who have received one or more out of school suspensions during the previous school term were randomly selected from 4 high schools in a suburban metro Atlanta school district. A bivariate regression analysis was used in this study. The results of the analysis showed a significant but weak negative correlation between days missed from school due to OSS and EOC analytic geometry and American Literature scores on the Georgia Milestones Assessment. This study may have implications for national school discipline policies in that the data may indicate a need for educational leaders to provide additional training for teachers and policy makers to take a closer look at the negative impact of zero tolerance policies in schools.
Indicators of the metabolic syndrome in obese adolescents

Introduction To assess the prevalence of metabolic risk indicators for the metabolic syndrome (MS) in a sample of obese Egyptian adolescents and to compare anthropometric and biochemical parameters in subjects with one or two parameters of the MS with those who meet MS criteria. Material and methods A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted on 300 obese adolescents, with a mean age of 15.45 ±2.54 years. Variables examined included body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), waist to hip ratio (WHR), systolic and diastolic blood pressure (BP), fasting blood glucose, cholesterol, triglycerides (TG), high-density lipoprotein (HDL), low-density lipoproteins (LDL), insulin and insulin resistance (IR) measured by Homeostasis Model Assessment-Insulin Resistance (HOMA-IR). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to determine the predictive powers of anthropometric parameters associated with increased risk for the MS. Results The overall prevalence of the MS was 20%. Individuals meeting 3 or more MS criteria had significantly higher levels of BP, TG, glucose, insulin and HOMA-R and low HDL levels compared with those who had 1 or 2 MS criteria. Area under the curve (AUC) for identifying the MS risk factors was the highest for WHR, followed by WC and BMI in both genders (p < 0.001). Conclusions The most prevalent metabolic risk factors that compose the MS were arterial hypertension, low HDL and hypertriglyceridemia; BMI tended to be the weakest index for identifying MS risk factors, while WHR was the best predictive index in both genders.
Avoiding the effect of BCG vaccination in detecting Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection with a blood test

Bacille Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccination can confound tuberculin skin test (TST) reactions in the diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI). The TST was compared with a Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB)-specific enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT) assay during an outbreak of MTB infection at a police academy in Germany. Participants were grouped according to their risk of LTBI in close (n = 36) or occasional (n = 333) contacts to the index case. For the TST, the positive response rate was 53% (19 out of 36) among close and 16% (52 out of 333) among occasional contacts. In total, 56 TST-positive contacts (56 out of 71 = 78.9%) and 27 TST-negative controls (27 out of 298 = 9.1%) underwent ELISPOT testing. The odds ratio (OR) of a positive test result across the two groups was 29.2 (95% confidence interval (CI) 3.5–245.0) for the ELISPOT and 19.7 (95% CI 2.0–190.2) for the TST with a 5 mm cut-off. Of 369 contacts, 158 (42.8%) had previously received BCG vaccination. The overall agreement between the TST and the ELISPOT was low, and positive TST reactions were confounded by BCG vaccination (OR 4.8 (95% CI 1.3–18.0)). In contrast, use of a 10-mm induration cut-off for the TST among occasional contacts showed strong agreement between TST and ELISPOT in nonvaccinated persons. In bacille Calmette–Guérin-vaccinated individuals, the Mycobacterium tuberculosis-specific enzyme-linked immunospot assay is a better indicator for the risk of latent tuberculosis infection than the tuberculin skin test.
Self-compression of optical laser pulses by filamentation

During the propagation of intense femtosecond laser pulses in a transparent medium, pulse shortening can occur without external guiding. Experimental evidence for this effect and a description of its physical origin are presented. Nearly single cycle pulses at 800 nm with an energy of 0.120 mJ can be obtained with excellent beam quality. Carrier envelope offset phase (CEP) stability is conserved or even improved after the nonlinear propagation stage. Prospects for further improvement are discussed.
Towards an Agile Process Maturity Model

Agile Methods are a widely applied and feasible alternative to Tayloristic (traditional) Methods for developing high-quality software on a limited schedule. Although Agile Methods are been adopted by various organizations, there still does not exist a well disseminated process maturity model that can satisfactorily guide the improvement and assess the status of agile processes. Currently, there are no alternatives other than models such as CMMI or ISO/IEC 15504 which, unfortunately, contain many assumptions that conflict with the agile attitude. This work suggests a solution for this problem by introducing a process maturity model more synergistic with Agile Methods. The main objective of this model is to guide the adequate application of Agile Methods in organizations, according to well-known Software Engineering practices.
Paper2vec: Citation-Context Based Document Distributed Representation for Scholar Recommendation

Due to the availability of references of research papers and the rich information contained in papers, various citation analysis approaches have been proposed to identify similar documents for scholar recommendation. Despite of the success of previous approaches, they are, however, based on co-occurrence of items. Once there are no co-occurrence items available in documents, they will not work well. Inspired by distributed representations of words in the literature of natural language processing, we propose a novel approach to measuring the similarity of papers based on distributed representations learned from the citation context of papers. We view the set of papers as the vocabulary, define the weighted citation context of papers, and convert it to weight matrix similar to the word-word cooccurrence matrix in natural language processing. After that we explore a variant of matrix factorization approach to train distributed representations of papers on the matrix, and leverage the distributed representations to measure similarities of papers. In the experiment, we exhibit that our approach outperforms state-of-theart citation-based approaches by 25%, and better than other distributed representation based methods.
Current oncologic concepts and emerging techniques for imaging of head and neck squamous cell cancer

The incidence of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is increasing and currently they account for 5% of all malignancies worldwide. Inspite of ongoing developments in diagnostic imaging and new therapeutic options, HNSCC still represents a multidisciplinary challenge. One of the most important prognostic factors in HNSCC is the presence of lymph node metastases. Patients with confirmed nodal involvement have a considerable reduction of their 5-year overall survival rate. In the era of individually optimised surgery, chemotherapy and intensity modulated radiotherapy, the main role of pre- and posttherapeutic imaging remains cancer detection at an early stage and accurate follow-up. The combined effort of early diagnosis and close patient monitoring after surgery and/or radio-chemotherapy influences disease progression and outcome predicition in patients with HNSCC. This review article focuses on currrent oncologic concepts and emerging tools in imaging of head and neck squamous cell cancer. Besides the diagnostic spectrum of the individual imaging modalities, their limitations are also discussed. One main part of this article is dedicated to PET-CT which combines functional and morphological imaging. Furthermore latest developments in MRI are presented with regard to lymph node staging and response prediction. Last but not least, a clinical contribution in this review explains, which information the head and neck surgeon requires from the multimodality imaging and its impact on operation planning.
Whole Blood Gene Expression Differentiates between Atrial Fibrillation and Sinus Rhythm after Cardioversion

Background Treatment to restore sinus rhythm among patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) has limited long-term success rates. Gene expression profiling may provide new insights into AF pathophysiology. Objective To identify biomarkers and improve our understanding of AF pathophysiology by comparing whole blood gene expression before and after electrical cardioversion (ECV). Methods In 46 patients with persistent AF that underwent ECV, whole blood samples were collected 1–2 hours before and 4 to 6 weeks after successful cardioversion. The paired samples were sent for microarray and plasma biomarker comparison. Results Of 13,942 genes tested, expression of SLC25A20 and PDK4 had the strongest associations with AF. Post-cardioversion, SLC25A20 and PDK4 expression decreased by 0.8 (CI 0.7–0.8, p = 2.0x10-6) and 0.7 (CI 0.6–0.8, p = 3.0x10-5) fold respectively. Median N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) concentrations decreased from 127.7 pg/mL to 44.9 pg/mL (p = 2.3x10-13) after cardioversion. AF discrimination models combining NT-proBNP and gene expression (NT-proBNP + SLC25A20 area under the curve = 0.88, NT-proBNP + PDK4 AUC = 0.86) had greater discriminative capacity as compared with NT-proBNP alone (AUC = 0.82). Moreover, a model including NT-proBNP, SLC25A20 and PDK4 significantly improved AF discrimination as compared with other models (AUC = 0.87, Net Reclassification Index >0.56, p<5.8x10-3). We validated the association between SLC25A20 and PDK4 with AF in an independent sample of 17 patients. Conclusion This study demonstrates that SLC25A20, PDK4, and NT-proBNP have incremental utility as biomarkers discriminating AF from sinus rhythm. Elevated SLC25A20 and PDK4 expression during AF indicates an important role for energy metabolism in AF.
Analysing the impact of Internet based technologies implementation process on the relations in a supply chain : an explorative research design

Companies are using Internet technologies to manage their customers and their supply chain transactions, and find that these applications can offer a great return on investment. Companies realized that to build their own business globally, they had to find better ways to serve their customers, and had to work more efficiently with their suppliers. This is often the first step of a virtual integrated supply chain. In order to reach this goal a new technology has to be implemented. In other words, a technology has to be absorbed by the organization that is involved in the implementation process. During internet based technologies implementation process users of information and communication technologies (ICT) systems are obliged to overcome the failures and the problems that inhibit the complete “absorption” of the technology, making it difficult to let it become part of the usual managerial routine. Therefore, there are two key entities that characterize the implementation process: the organizations involved and the technology implemented. The purpose of this paper is to frame the analysis on the implementation process of an ICT in the context of a supply chain, to propose a research design useful to understand how an Internet-based technology implementation can shape and change the context.
Patterns of coral ecological immunology: variation in the responses of Caribbean corals to elevated temperature and a pathogen elicitor

SUMMARY Disease epizootics are increasing with climatic shifts, yet within each system only a subset of species are identified as the most vulnerable. Understanding ecological immunology patterns as well as environmental influences on immune defenses will provide insight into the persistence of a functional system through adverse conditions. Amongst the most threatened ecosystems are coral reefs, with coral disease epizootics and thermal stress jeopardizing their survival. Immune defenses were investigated within three Caribbean corals, Montastraea faveolata, Stephanocoenia intersepta and Porites astreoides, which represent a range of disease and bleaching susceptibilities. Levels of several immune parameters were measured in response to elevated water temperature and the presence of a commercial pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP) – lipopolysaccharide (LPS) – as an elicitor of the innate immune response. Immune parameters included prophenoloxidase (PPO) activity, melanin concentration, bactericidal activity, the antioxidants peroxidase and catalase, and fluorescent protein (FP) concentration. LPS induced an immune response in all three corals, although each species responded differently to the experimental treatments. For example, M. faveolata, a disease-susceptible species, experienced significant decreases in bactericidal activity and melanin concentration after exposure to LPS and elevated temperature alone. Porites astreoides, a disease-resistant species, showed increased levels of enzymatic antioxidants upon exposure to LPS independently and increased PPO activity in response to the combination of LPS and elevated water temperature. This study demonstrates the ability of reef-building corals to induce immune responses in the presence of PAMPs, indicating activation of PAMP receptors and the transduction of appropriate signals leading to immune effector responses. Furthermore, these data address the emerging field of ecological immunology by highlighting interspecific differences in immunity and immunocompetences among Caribbean corals, which are reflected in their life-history characteristics, disease susceptibilities and bleaching-induced mortality.
Next Gen PCFG Password Cracking

Passwords continue to remain an important authentication technique. The probabilistic context-free grammar-based password cracking system of Weir et al. was an important addition to dictionary-based password cracking approaches. In this paper, we show how to substantially improve upon this system by systematically adding keyboard patterns and multiword patterns (two or more words in the alphabetic part of a password) to the context-free grammars used in the probabilistic password cracking. Our results on cracking multiple data sets show that by learning these new classes of patterns, we can achieve up to 22% improvement over the original system. In this paper, we also define metrics to help analyze and improve attack dictionaries. Using our approach to improving the dictionary, we achieve an additional improvement of ~33% by increasing the coverage of a standard attack dictionary. Combining both approaches, we can achieve a 55% improvement over the previous system. Our tests were done over fairly long password guessing sessions (up to 85 billion) and thus show the uniform effectiveness of our techniques for long cracking sessions.
On the First Passage time for Brownian Motion Subordinated by a Lévy Process

In this paper we consider the class of Lévy processes that can be written as a Brownian motion time changed by an independent Lévy subordinator. Examples in this class include the variance-gamma (VG) model, the normal-inverse Gaussian model, and other processes popular in financial modeling. The question addressed is the precise relation between the standard first passage time and an alternative notion, which we call the first passage of the second kind, as suggested by Hurd (2007) and others. We are able to prove that the standard first passage time is the almost-sure limit of iterations of the first passage of the second kind. Many different problems arising in financial mathematics are posed as first passage problems, and motivated by this fact, we are led to consider the implications of the approximation scheme for fast numerical methods for computing first passage. We find that the generic form of the iteration can be competitive with other numerical techniques. In the particular case of the VG model, the scheme can be further refined to give very fast algorithms.
Teacher Perceptions of Parental Involvement With Parents Who are Deployed: A Case Study

ii Dedication . iii Acknowledgements . iv List of Figures . xi List of Tables . xii Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 Background . 2 Conceptual Framework . 3 Statement of the Problem . 4 Purpose of the Study . 5 Research Questions . 6 Research Methodology . 6 Population . 7 Significance. 7 Definition of Terms. 8 Assumptions . 9 Delimitations . 9 Limitations . 10 Chapter 1 Summary . 11 Chapter 2: Literature Review . 12 Context . 13 Significance. 14