Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The relationship between mindfulness, emotion regulation, habitual thinking and eating behaviours

Evidence regarding the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) for health-related eating behaviours is emerging. However, the underlying mechanisms are unclear. This thesis presents findings from a series of studies examining the role of two potential mechanisms; extending research into the role of emotion regulation and is the first known research to examine the role of mental habit. A mixed method approach was used to increase understanding about relations between mindfulness (dispositional, experimentally manipulated, and cultivated through practice) and reward motivated eating (RME; uncontrolled and emotional). Chapters one and two provide a review of current literature. Chapter three presents findings from an initial online study in which mediation analyses support the proposition that difficulties in emotion regulation and habitual negative self-thinking are underlying mechanisms in relations between dispositional mindfulness and RME. In addition, participants who engaged in mindfulness meditation reported greater dispositional mindfulness, fewer difficulties in emotion regulation, less habitual negative self-thinking, and uncontrolled or emotional eating. The second study examined mindful induction scripts, a necessary and novel step in clarifying and increasing transparency in the attribution of effects evidenced in experimental settings. The analysis and resultant components informed the development of a Mindful Attention Induction (MAI) used in study three to examine the influence of an MAI on hedonic reactivity to the properties of food. Subjective hunger decreased and fullness increased for the mindfulness group compared to the control group indicating that mindful attention to properties of food can reduce hedonic reactivity, however, the effects were short lived. Importantly, food intake was significantly greater for the control group compared to the mindful group despite, by that point, no subjective differences in craving or appetitive measures. The findings illustrate how a mindful approach cultivated through mindful mediation may influence behavioural change without reliance on translation of intentions into actions. The final study piloted the Mindful Eating Programme, a synthesis of the findings and methods of studies 1-3. Qualitative analyses provides a picture of the process of change, which was often attributed to increased awareness of antecedents to undesired eating tendencies, noticing in the present moment and use of mindfulness practices as a tool to realise change.
SplitBoard: A Simple Split Soft Keyboard for Wristwatch-sized Touch Screens

Text entry on a smartwatch is a challenging problem due to the device's limited screen area. In this paper, we introduce the SplitBoard, which is a soft keyboard designed for a smartwatch. As the user flicks left or right on the keyboard, it switches between the left and right halves of a QWERTY keyboard. We report the results of two user experiments where the SplitBoard was compared to an ordinary QWERTY keyboard, the ZoomBoard, SlideBoard, and Qwerty-like keypad. We measured the initial performance with new users for each method. The SplitBoard outperformed all other techniques in the experiments. The SplitBoard is expected to be a viable option for smartwatch text entry because of its light processing requirements, good performance, and immediate learnability.
“The JVT Advanced Video Coding Standard: Complexity and Performance Analysis on a Tool-by-tool Basis”

The Advanced Video Codec (AVC), currently being defined by a Joint Video Team (JVT) of ISO/IEC and ITU-T, aims at enhanced coding efficiency and network friendliness over a wide range of transmission systems. While the basic framework is similar to the motion compensated hybrid scheme of previous video coding standards, additional tools improve the compression efficiency at the expense of an increased implementation cost. This paper presents a systematic analysis of the complexity and the rate-distortion performances of the new tools over a wide variety of video contents. The simulation results show how the improved coding efficiency, up to 50 %, comes with a complexity increase of more than one order of magnitude at the encoder and a factor 2 for the decoder. This represents a design challenge for resource constrained electronic systems such as wireless devices or cost-effective consumer terminals. A thorough video tool-by-tool analysis, carried out in terms of memory cost, computational burden and compression efficiency, indicates that a proper use of the AVC tools allows for the same performance as the most complex configuration (all tools on) while considerably reducing the complexity. The reported results highlight the AVC implementation bottlenecks, provide input to assist the definition of profiles in the standard and enable the selection of the optimal balance between coding efficiency and implementation complexity.
Eliminating intra-warp conflict misses in GPU

Cache indexing functions play a key role in reducing conflict misses by spreading accesses evenly among all sets of cache blocks. Although various methods have been proposed, no significant effort has been expended on the behavior of conflict misses in GPU where threads are organized into warps and execute in lock-step. When intra-warp accesses could not be coalesced into one or two cache blocks, which is often referred to as memory divergence, a warp incurs up to SIMD-width (e.g., 32) independent cache accesses. Such a burst of divergent accesses not only increases contention on cache capacity, but also incurs intra-warp associativity conflicts when they are pathologically concentrated in a few cache sets. Due to the lockstep execution, the GPU Load/Store units would be stalled when intra-warp concentration exceeds available cache associativity. Through an in-depth analysis of GPU access patterns, we find that column-majored strided accesses are likely to incur high intra-warp concentration. Based on the analysis, we propose a Full Permutation (FUP) based indexing method that adapts to both large and medium strides in this pattern. Across the 10 highly cache-sensitive GPU applications we have evaluated, FUP eliminates intra-warp associativity conflicts and outperforms two state-of-the-art indexing methods by 22% and 15%, respectively.
Scheduling file transfers in a distributed network

We consider a problem of scheduling file transfers in a network so as to minimize overall finishing time, which we formalize as a problem of scheduling the edges of a weighted multigraph. Although the general problem is NP-complete, we identify polynomial time solvable special eases and derive good performance bounds for several natural approximation algorithms. The above results assume the existence of a central controller, but we also show how the approximation algorithms, along with their performance guarantees, can be adapted to a distributed regime.
Contemporary Concepts of Masculinity and Femininity

Masculinity and femininity as perceived by middle-class American men and women were investigated in two studies. Using adjective checklists and semantic differentials, Ss described most and least masculine and most and least feminine persons. The sexes generally agreed upon the nature of masculinity and femininity. Indices of relationship based upon adjective endorsements indicated that masculinity and femininity are not opposite ends of a bipolar variable; most masculine and most feminine persons have shared traits as well as differentiating ones. Least masculine and least feminine persons have traits negatively related to both most masculine and most feminine persons. The results also emphasized that descriptions of males and females undifferentiated as to degree of sex identity provide incomplete information about the nature of masculinity and femininity.
Stochastic Network Motif Detection in Social Media

Network motifs refer to recurrent patterns of interconnections which are found to be over-represented in real networks when compared with random ones. Such basic building blocks can well characterize the structure of complex networks. Extending the building blocks to stochastic ones allows for more robust motif detection networks which are stochastic in nature. Network motif analysis, commonly adopted in bioinformatics, has recently been applied to also online social media. In this paper, we propose to detect stochastic network motifs in social media with the conjecture that social interactions are of stochastic nature. In particular, we apply a stochastic motif detection algorithm based on the finite mixture model to both synthesized datasets and real on-line datasets to evaluate the effectiveness. Also, we discuss how the obtained stochastic motifs could be interpreted and compared qualitatively with some of the results obtained from others which are recently reported in the literature.
The Formation of Brown Dwarfs as Ejected Stellar Embryos

We conjecture that brown dwarfs are substellar objects because they have been ejected from small newborn multiple systems that have decayed in dynamical interactions. In this view, brown dwarfs are stellar embryos for which the star formation process was aborted before the hydrostatic cores could build up enough mass to eventually start hydrogen burning. The disintegration of a small multiple system is a stochastic process, which can be described only in terms of the half-life of the decay. A stellar embryo competes with its siblings in order to accrete infalling matter, and the one that grows slowest is most likely to be ejected. With better luck, a brown dwarf would therefore have become a normal star. This interpretation of brown dwarfs readily explains the rarity of brown dwarfs as close companions to normal stars, the absence of wide brown dwarf binaries, and the flattening of the low-mass end of the initial mass function. Possible observational tests of this scenario include statistics of brown dwarfs near Class 0 sources and the kinematics of brown dwarfs in star-forming regions, while they still retain a kinematic signature of their expulsion. Because the ejection process limits the amount of gas brought along in a disk, it is predicted that substellar equivalents to the classical T Tauri stars should be rather short-lived.
Rising Earnings Instability, Portfolio Choice, and Housing Prices

This paper studies the effects of the U.S. rising earnings inequality between the late 1960s and the mid 1990s on the portfolio allocation and prices of assets. In order to investigate the link, a life-cycle general equilibrium model is constructed where distinct characteristics of the housing asset is explicitly modeled and asset prices are determined in equilibrium. It is shown that the model can produce a 9% rise in the housing price, which is about 40% of the changes in the U.S. data (24%). An increased demand for precautionary savings and the general equilibrium effect play a crucial role here. A higher earnings volatility induces a higher demand for financial assets. As the return of financial assets declines due to the general equilibrium effect, the demand for housing assets increases as well. The paper also examines the effects of the rising earnings inequality on the aggregate amount of debt. Interestingly, contrary to the U.S. data, the model predicts a decline in the total amount of secured debt. A higher earnings volatility induces a higher amount of debt in complete markets models, but an increased demand for savings for precautionary motive dominates the positive effect to the amount of debt. The model also shows that incorporating housing assets into the model does not make a significant difference in the effect of the rising earnings inequality on the consumption inequality.
Detection of Wolbachia in the Tick Ixodes ricinus is Due to the Presence of the Hymenoptera Endoparasitoid Ixodiphagus hookeri

The identification of micro-organisms carried by ticks is an important issue for human and animal health. In addition to their role as pathogen vectors, ticks are also the hosts for symbiotic bacteria whose impact on tick biology is poorly known. Among these, the bacterium Wolbachia pipientis has already been reported associated with Ixodes ricinus and other tick species. However, the origins of Wolbachia in ticks and their consequences on tick biology (known to be very diverse in invertebrates, ranging from nutritional symbionts in nematodes to reproductive manipulators in insects) are unknown. Here we report that the endoparasitoid wasp Ixodiphagus hookeri (Hymenoptera, Chalcidoidea, Encyrtidae) – strictly associated with ticks for their development - is infested at almost 100% prevalence by a W. pipientis strain belonging to a Wolbachia supergroup that has already been reported as associated with other hymenopteran parasitoids. In a natural population of I. ricinus that suffers high parasitism rates due to I. hookeri, we used specific PCR primers for both hymenopteran and W. pipientis gene fragments to show that all unfed tick nymphs parasitized by I. hookeri also harbored Wolbachia, while unparasitized ticks were Wolbachia-free. We demonstrated experimentally that unfed nymphs obtained from larvae exposed to I. hookeri while gorging on their vertebrate host also harbor Wolbachia. We hypothesize that previous studies that have reported W. pipientis in ticks are due to the cryptic presence of the endoparasitoid wasp I. hookeri. This association has remained hidden until now because parasitoids within ticks cannot be detected until engorgement of the nymphs brings the wasp eggs out of diapause. Finally, we discuss the consequences of this finding for our understanding of the tick microbiome, and their possible role in horizontal gene transfer among pathogenic and symbiotic bacteria.
Behind The Scenes at HCI's Turn to the Arts

Since 2000, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has seen a turn to the artistic, looking at more provocative, cultural and social experiences. In doing so HCI is increasingly collaborating with artists who engage with real world data. Much of this work focuses on engaging the public in the spectacle of interactive experiences. In contrast, this paper takes a look behind the scenes by studying a collaboration between artists, climate scientists and researchers as they designed a participatory sensing system to interpret scientific data for public presentation. This paper presents this cross-disciplinary approach from the perspective of an artist/researcher on the project.
Astronomical Results from the University of Hawaii Adaptive Optics Program : Astronomical Problems Well Suited to Adaptive Optics Techniques

The University of Hawaii adaptive optics (AO) group has been actively carrying out astronomical AO observations for the last four years. The UHAO group and our collaborators have utilized the curvature AO system to obtain diffraction-limited images of asteroids, planets, moons, protoplanetary disks, young stars, young star clusters, planetary nebulae, black holes, galaxies, and quasars. The current scientific capabilities of the new 36-actuator Hokupa ̇a AO curvature system will be briefly reviewed. Four key astronomical situations that are excellent for AO observations will be discussed. Examples of scientific observational techniques will be highlighted with actual AO astronomical results.
Paediatric Research Society 325 Measurement of intrathoracic pressure in the newborn

Measurement of intrathoracic pressure in the newborn. George Russell and Robert Dinwiddie. Department of Child Health, University of Aberdeen. Changes in intraoesophageal pressure (Poes) have been shown, subject to certain limitations, to reflect changes in intrapleural pressure (Ppl) in the adult. However, though Poes is widely used in the study of respiratory mechanics in the newborn, the only comparison of Ppl and Poes so far reported has been in a single anencephalic infant (Hustead and Avery, 1964). Four infants with spontaneous left-sided pneumothorax were studied. The pressure recorded from an oesophageal balloon with known pressure-volume characteristics was compared with the pressure recorded from the pleural drain. The mean oesophageal pressure swing (A Poes) in 100 breaths in the 4 babies was 5*9 cm H20 (SD±1.0), the corresponding value for the intrapleural pressure swing (A Ppl) being 5-7 cm H20 (SD ±1 -0), giving a mean difference 0 2 cm H2O. The relation between A Poes and A Ppl varied between infants, and in the same infant from time to time, but the correlation between the two pressure swings was close (r = 0-823, P <0 001), and the regression of A Poes on A Ppl fell close to the line of identity (A Poes =0-83, A Ppl=1-12). When absolute pressures were compared, Poes was slightly higher than Ppl. The effect of posture on Poes is similar to that described in the adult (Ferris, Mead, and Frank, 1959). In the supine position, widely used in the study of respiratory mechanics in the newborn and especially during whole body plethysmography, Poes is substantially more positive than in the upright or lateral position, and does not accurately reflect Ppl. A comparison of pressure-volume loops using simultaneously measured Poes and Ppl shows that Poes measured in the right lateral position can be used as a satisfactory altemative to Ppl in the measurement of respiratory mechanics.
Angiogenic activity of multiple myeloma endothelial cells in vivo in the chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane assay is associated to a down-regulation in the expression of endogenous endostatin

We have attempted a fine characterization of the angiogenic response induced by multiple myeloma endothelial cells (MMEC) by using the chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) assay and by reverse transcriptase‐polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR). Results showed that in the CAM assay MMEC induced an angiogenic response comparable to that of a well‐known angiogenic cytokine, namely fibroblast growth factor‐2 (FGF‐2), while RT‐PCR demonstrated that the expression of endostatin mRNA detected in MM treated CAM was significantly lower respect to control CAM. These data suggest that angiogenic switch in MM may involve loss of an endogenous angiogenesis inhibitor, such as endostatin.
THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES (SNSS) ON STUDENTS’ SOCIAL INTERACTION

This study explored the impact of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) on students’ social interaction at Northeast Normal University in China. The study was guided by three research questions; what are the levels of SNS time use and social connectedness in terms of gender? , what are the differences of university students SNS time use and social connectedness and what is the relationship between SNS time use and social connectedness. It involved a total sample of 79 students from various faculties and majors who were randomly selected. Data was collected by using a questionnaire which had two scales; SNSs time use scale and social connectedness scale. Findings revealed that there are significant differences on number of years one has engaged himself with SNSs, number of friends that one has and amount of hours that one spends using SNSs with SNSs time use scale. There is also significant difference on number of SNSs applications that one has with social connectedness. The study also revealed a positive correlation between SNSs time use and social connectedness. No significant differences were found among gender, age and faculty with social connectedness. It was recommended that further research should be conducted on the same using more variables and a wider dimension. Article visualizations:
PINCH1 regulates cell-matrix and cell-cell adhesions, cell polarity and cell survival during the peri-implantation stage

PINCH1 is composed of 5 LIM domains, binds integrin-linked kinase (ILK) and locates to integrin-mediated adhesion sites. In order to investigate PINCH1 function we generated mice and embryonic stem (ES) cell-derived embryoid bodies (EBs) lacking the PINCH1 gene. Similar to mice lacking β1 integrin or Ilk, loss of PINCH1 arrested development at the peri-implantation stage. In contrast to β1 integrin or Ilk mutants, however, disruption of the PINCH1 gene produced implantation chambers with visible cell clumps even at embryonic day 9.5. In order to define the phenotype leading to the peri-implantation lethality we made PINCH1-null EBs and found similar but also additional defects not observed in β1 integrin or Ilk mutant EBs. The similarities included abnormal epiblast polarity, impaired cavitation and detachment of endoderm and epiblast from basement membranes. Additional defects, which were not observed in β1 integrin- or ILK-deficient mice or EBs, included abnormal cell-cell adhesion of endoderm and epiblast as well as the presence of apoptotic cells in the endodermal cell layer. Although ILK and PINCH1 were shown to be involved in the phosphorylation of serine-473 of PKB/Akt, immunostaining with specific antibodies revealed no apparent alteration of PKB/Akt phosphorylation in PINCH1-deficient EBs. Altogether these data demonstrate an important role of PINCH1 for integrin function, actin organization, cell-cell adhesion and endodermal cell survival during the implanting of mouse embryos.
Attention Deficit- Hyperactivity Disorder and Asymmetry of the Caudate Nucleus

The neurologic basis of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is poorly understood. Based on previous studies that have implicated metabolic deficiencies in the caudate-striatal region in ADHD, we employed magnetic resonance imaging to investigate patterns of morphology of the head of the caudate nucleus in normal and ADHD children. In normal children, 72.7% evidenced a left-larger-than-right (L > R) pattern of asymmetry, whereas 63.6% of the ADHD children had the reverse (L < R) pattern of asymmetry of the head of the caudate nucleus. This reversal of normal asymmetry in ADHD children was due to a significantly smaller left caudate nucleus. The reversal in asymmetry of the head of the caudate was most notable in ADHD males. These results suggest that normal (L > R) morphologic asymmetry in the region of the caudate nucleus may be related to asymmetries observed in neurotransmitter systems implicated in ADHD. The behavioral symptoms of ADHD may reflect disinhibition from normal levels of dominant hemispheric control, possibly correlated with deviations in asymmetric caudate-striatal morphology and deficiencies in associated neurotransmitter systems. (J Child Neurol 1993;8:339-347).