Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toward more comparability and generalizability of developmental research.

BELL, RICHARD Q. , and HERTZ, THOMAS W. Toward More Comparability and Generalizability of Developmental Research. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 6-13. This paper reports evidence of societal change that exceeds the pace at which dependable, agreed-upon findings emerge from relevant research efforts. The research establishment in developmental psychology is then examined to determine those aspects that are affecting our ability to produce better results faster. Self-corrective mechanisms that already exist in the system are identified along with areas in which new mechanisms are needed. Several examples are reported of spontaneous developments that have occurred among investigators interested in taking steps to achieve more rapid progress through greater comparability and generalizability of findings. Finally, the paper discusses steps that can be taken by individual investigators, academic departments, scientific disciplines, and supporting foundations or agencies.
Nanotheranostics ˗ Application and Further Development of Nanomedicine Strategies for Advanced Theranostics

Nanotheranostics is to apply and further develop nanomedicine strategies for advanced theranostics. This review summarizes the various nanocarriers developed so far in the literature for nanotheranostics, which include polymer conjugations, dendrimers, micelles, liposomes, metal and inorganic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and nanoparticles of biodegradable polymers for sustained, controlled and targeted co-delivery of diagnostic and therapeutic agents for better theranostic effects with fewer side effects. The theranostic nanomedicine can achieve systemic circulation, evade host defenses and deliver the drug and diagnostic agents at the targeted site to diagnose and treat the disease at cellular and molecular level. The therapeutic and diagnostic agents are formulated in nanomedicine as a single theranostic platform, which can then be further conjugated to biological ligand for targeting. Nanotheranostics can also promote stimuli-responsive release, synergetic and combinatory therapy, siRNA co-delivery, multimodality therapies, oral delivery, delivery across the blood-brain barrier as well as escape from intracellular autophagy. The fruition of nanotheranostics will be able to provide personalized therapy with bright prognosis, which makes even the fatal diseases curable or at least treatable at the earliest stage.
Subjective Effects of Ethanol, Morphine, Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, and Ketamine Following a Pharmacological Challenge Are Related to Functional Brain Connectivity

This analysis examines the neuronal foundation of drug-induced psychomimetic symptoms by relating the severity of these symptoms to changes in functional connectivity for a range of different psychoactive compounds with varying degrees of psychomimetic effects. The repeated measures design included 323 resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging time series and measures of subjective effects in 36 healthy male volunteers. Four different pharmacological challenges with ethanol, morphine, Δ(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol, and ketamine (12 subjects per drug) were applied. A set of 10 "template" resting-state networks was used to determine individual connectivity maps. Linear regression was used for each individual subject to relate these connectivity maps to three clusters of drug-induced subjective psychomimetic effects ("perception," "relaxation," and "dysphoria") as measured with visual analogue scales. Group analysis showed that the subjective effects of perception correlated significantly across drugs with the connectivity of the posterior cingulate cortex and precentral gyrus with the sensorimotor network (p < 0.005, corrected). No significant correlations were found for relaxation or dysphoria. The posterior cingulate cortex has a role in visuospatial evaluation and the precentral gyrus has been associated with auditory hallucinations. Both the posterior cingulate cortex and the precentral gyrus show changes in activation in patients with schizophrenia, which can be related to the severity of positive symptoms (i.e., hallucinations and delusions), and have previously been related to changes induced by psychoactive drugs. The similarity of functional connectivity changes for drug-induced psychomimetic effects and symptoms of psychosis provides further support for the use of pharmacological challenges with psychomimetic drugs as models for psychosis.
Transcriptome Analysis and Ultrastructure Observation Reveal that Hawthorn Fruit Softening Is due to Cellulose/Hemicellulose Degradation

Softening, a common phenomenon in many fruits, is a well coordinated and genetically determined process. However, the process of flesh softening during ripening has rarely been described in hawthorn. In this study, we found that ‘Ruanrou Shanlihong 3 Hao’ fruits became softer during ripening, whereas ‘Qiu JinXing’ fruits remained hard. At late developmental stages, the firmness of ‘Ruanrou Shanlihong 3 Hao’ fruits rapidly declined, and that of ‘Qiu JinXing’ fruits remained essentially unchanged. According to transmission electron microscopy, the middle lamella of ‘Qiu JinXing’ and ‘Ruanrou Shanlihong 3 Hao’ fruit flesh was largely degraded as the fruits matured. Microfilaments in ‘Qiu JinXing’ flesh were arranged close together and were deep in color, whereas those in ‘Ruanrou Shanlihong 3 Hao’ fruit flesh were arranged loosely, partially degraded and light in color. RNA-Seq analysis yielded approximately 46.72 Gb of clean data and 72,837 unigenes. Galactose metabolism and pentose and glucuronate interconversions are involved in cell wall metabolism, play an important role in hawthorn texture. We identified 85 unigenes related to the cell wall between hard- and soft-fleshed hawthorn fruits. Based on data analysis and real-time PCR, we suggest that β-GAL and PE4 have important functions in early fruit softening. The genes Ffase, Gns,α-GAL, PE63, XTH, and CWP, which are involved in cell wall degradation, are responsible for the different textures of hawthorn fruits. Thus, we hypothesize that the different textures of ‘Qiu JinXing’ and ‘Ruanrou Shanlihong 3 Hao’ fruits at maturity mainly result from cellulose/hemicelluloses degradation rather than from lamella degradation. Overall, we propose that different types of hydrolytic enzymes in cells interact to degrade the cell wall, resulting in ultramicroscopic Structure changes in the cell wall and, consequently, fruit softening. These results provide fundamental insight regarding the mechanisms by which hawthorn fruits acquire different textures and also lay a solid foundation for further research.
Global Multi-armed Bandits with Hölder Continuity

Standard Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems assume that the arms are independent. However, in many application scenarios, the information obtained by playing an arm provides information about the remainder of the arms. Hence, in such applications, this informativeness can and should be exploited to enable faster convergence to the optimal solution. In this paper, formalize a new class of multi-armed bandit methods, Global Multi-armed Bandit (GMAB), in which arms are globally informative through a global parameter, i.e., choosing an arm reveals information about all the arms. We propose a greedy policy for the GMAB which always selects the arm with the highest estimated expected reward, and prove that it achieves bounded parameter-dependent regret. Hence, this policy selects suboptimal arms only nitely many times, and after a nite number of initial time steps, the optimal arm is selected in all of the remaining time steps with probability one. In addition, we also study how the informativeness of the arms about each other’s rewards aects the speed of learning. Specically, we prove that the parameter-free (worst-case) regret is sublinear in time, and decreases with the informativeness of the arms. We also prove a sublinear in time Bayesian risk bound for the GMAB which reduces to the well-known Bayesian risk bound for linearly parameterized bandits when the arms are fully informative. GMABs have applications ranging from drug dosage control to dynamic pricing.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General The Cost and Benefit of Implicit Spatial Cues for Visual Attention

words: Why emotion matters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14–34. doi:10.1037/a0021446 Kunde, W. , & Wühr, P. (2004). Actions blind to conceptually overlapping stimuli. Psychological Research, 68, 199–207. Lakens, D. (2011). High skies and oceans deep: Polarity benefits or mental simulation? Frontiers in Cognition, 2, Article 21. doi:10.3389/fpsyg
Measuring Outcomes in Couple Therapy: A Systematic Review and Critical Discussion

This systematic review examined the measurement of outcomes in couple therapy research over the previous ten years. Eighty-one couple therapy outcome studies were systematically examined. Relative to previous two reviews that included both couple and family interventions, this review focused solely on couple therapy outcome studies and identified that a greater diversity in outcome measurements have begun to emerge in the field. Additionally, couple therapy outcome studies are beginning to explore the impact of couple interventions in the context of problems traditionally associated with individual pathology and individual treatment. Our review reinforced findings and recommendations from previous reviews, including the need for rigorous research design and explication of couple therapy models of intervention. Additionally, we recommend that qualitative analyses of unexpected findings or outcomes that may be interpreted as negative outcomes may assist couple therapy researchers in better understanding these findings.
Internal Monitoring Mechanisms and CEO Turnover: A Long-Term Perspective

We report evidence on chief executive officer (CEO) turnover during the 1971 to 1994 period. We find that the nature of CEO turnover activity has changed over time. The frequencies of forced CEO turnover and outside succession both increased. However, the relation between the likelihood of forced CEO turnover and firm performance did not change significantly from the beginning to the end of the period we examine, despite substantial changes in internal governance mechanisms. The evidence also indicates that changes in the intensity of the takeover market are not associated with changes in the sensitivity of CEO turnover to firm performance.
Defining assessment literacy: Is it different for language testers and non-language testers?

Language assessment courses (LACs) are taught by professionals who have majored in the area of language testing (language testers or LTs), but also by others who come from different language-related majors (non-language testers, non-LTs). Different language assessment courses may be developed, depending on who teaches the course and the instructors’ understanding of assessment literacy. This study seeks to investigate the effect instructors bring in shaping the characteristics (i.e., content and structure) of language assessment courses. Findings from an online instructor survey (N = 140) and in-depth follow-up phone interviews (N = 13) show that there are significant differences in the content of the courses depending on the instructors’ background in six topic areas: test specifications, test theory, basic statistics, classroom assessment, rubric development, and test accommodation. Interview results confirm non-LTs are less confident in teaching technical assessment skills compared to LTs and have a tendency to focus more on classroom assessment issues. The paper ends by stressing the importance of possessing a common understanding of assessment literacy among stakeholders within the testing community, but also among non-LTs who teach language assessment courses so as to maintain course quality and to better meet student teachers’ needs.
Efficient software implementations of large finite fields GF(2n) for secure storage applications

Finite fields are widely used in constructing error-correcting codes and cryptographic algorithms. In practice, error-correcting codes use small finite fields to achieve high-throughput encoding and decoding. Conversely, cryptographic systems employ considerably larger finite fields to achieve high levels of security. We focus on developing efficient software implementations of arithmetic operations in reasonably large finite fields as needed by secure storage applications. In this article, we study several arithmetic operation implementations for finite fields ranging from GF(232) to GF(2128). We implement multiplication and division in these finite fields by making use of precomputed tables in smaller fields, and several techniques of extending smaller field arithmetic into larger field operations. We show that by exploiting known techniques, as well as new optimizations, we are able to efficiently support operations over finite fields of interest. We perform a detailed evaluation of several techniques, and show that we achieve very practical performance for both multiplication and division. Finally, we show how these techniques find applications in the implementation of HAIL, a highly available distributed cloud storage layer. Using the newly implemented arithmetic operations in GF(264), HAIL improves its performance by a factor of two, while simultaneously providing a higher level of security.
Comparing Deep Neural Networks and Traditional Vision Algorithms in Mobile Robotics

We consider the problem of object detection on a mobile robot by comparing and contrasting two types of algorithms for computer vision. The first approach is coined ”traditional computer vision” and refers to using commonly known feature descriptors (SIFT, SURF, BRIEF, etc.) for object detection. The second approach uses Deep Neural Networks for object detection. We show that deep neural networks perform better than traditional algorithms, but discuss major trade offs surrounding performance and training time.
Simultaneous scheduling, binding and layer assignment for synthesis of vertically integrated 3D systems

Three-dimensional vertically integrated systems allow active devices to be placed on multiple device layers. In recent years, a number of research efforts have addressed physical synthesis issues for such systems. Such efforts showed a significant reduction in interconnect lengths. In order to effectively synthesize designs for 3D systems, it is necessary to take layer assignment for resources into consideration at higher levels of the design abstraction. We address the layer assignment problem as a part of a physical aware behavioral synthesis flow. We propose a 0-1 linear program formulation to perform simultaneous and optimal scheduling, binding and layer assignment for synthesizing designs for three-dimensional vertically integrated systems. The objective is to minimize inter-stratal via and the interconnect length in the critical path while taking thermal gradient between layers into account (which has been shown to be of particular concern for 3D systems). Floorplanning is performed for the synthesized design in order to estimate interconnect lengths. Results show a reduction of approximately 37% in total interconnect lengths on an average, compared to a traditional two-dimensional implementation when 2-5 layer implementations are examined.
Predicting Visitor Satisfaction in Parks: Comparing the Value of Personal Benefit Attainment and Service Levels in Kakadu National Park, Australia

ABSTRACT Protected area managers are often interested in visitor satisfaction, a complex, multi-dimensional concept. This study of visitors to Kakadu National Park in Australia compares 2 approaches to predicting overall satisfaction and the intention to recommend the park. The first approach involves analyzing importance-performance measures on a range of visitor service quality items. The second approach involves measuring the desire and attainment of perceived benefits associated with a recreation experience. Results show that benefits attained by visitors are stronger predictors of an overall positive response to a park visit than visitor service quality ratings. Two types of benefits emerge from factor analysis—benefits derived from nature and benefits derived from relaxation—and these factors show varying degrees of correlation with overall response to the park depending on proximity of the respondents’ home to the park. The results suggest greater attention should be paid to the benefits people desire from their visits and increases our understanding of what benefits are dependent on the environment (biophysical, social, and managerial), the activity visitors participate in, or a combination of both. Such information can help park staff to create experiences likely to facilitate attainment of benefits that are important to visitors.
Hemodialysis-induced cardiac dysfunction is associated with an acute reduction in global and segmental myocardial blood flow.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Hemodialysis is associated with hemodynamic instability, acute cardiac ischemia, and the development of regional wall motion abnormalities (RWMAs). This study used serial intradialytic H(2)(15)O positron emission tomography scanning to confirm that the development of dialysis-induced RWMAs was associated with reduction in myocardial blood flow (MBF). DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS Four prevalent hemodialysis patients without angiographically significant coronary artery disease had measurements of MBF during standard hemodialysis and biofeedback dialysis. All patients underwent serial measurements of MBF using positron emission tomography. Concurrent echocardiography was used to assess left ventricular function and the development of RWMAs. Hemodynamic variables were measured using continuous pulse wave analysis. RESULTS Mean prehemodialysis MBF was within the normal range. Global MBF was acutely reduced during hemodialysis. Segmental MBF was reduced to a significantly greater extent in areas that developed RWMAs compared with those that did not. Not all regions with reduced MBF were functionally affected, but a reduction in myocardial blood flow of >30% from baseline was significantly associated with the development of RWMAs. No significant differences in hemodynamic tolerability, RWMA development, or MBF between dialysis modalities were observed. CONCLUSIONS Hemodialysis is associated with repetitive myocardial ischemia, which, in the absence of coronary artery disease, may be due to coronary microvascular dysfunction. Stress-induced segmental left ventricular dysfunction correlates with matched reduction in MBF. Functional poststress recovery is consistent with myocardial stunning induced by hemodialysis. This process may be important in the development of heart failure in long-term hemodialysis patients.
Amino Acid and Biogenic Amine Profile Deviations in an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test: A Comparison between Healthy and Hyperlipidaemia Individuals Based on Targeted Metabolomics

Hyperlipidemia (HLP) is characterized by a disturbance in lipid metabolism and is a primary risk factor for the development of insulin resistance (IR) and a well-established risk factor for cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis. The aim of this work was to investigate the changes in postprandial amino acid and biogenic amine profiles provoked by an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) in HLP patients using targeted metabolomics. We used ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry to analyze the serum amino acid and biogenic amine profiles of 35 control and 35 HLP subjects during an OGTT. The amino acid and biogenic amine profiles from 30 HLP subjects were detected as independent samples to validate the changes in the metabolites. There were differences in the amino acid and biogenic amine profiles between the HLP individuals and the healthy controls at baseline and after the OGTT. The per cent changes of 13 metabolites from fasting to the 2 h samples during the OGTT in the HLP patients were significantly different from those of the healthy controls. The lipid parameters were associated with the changes in valine, isoleucine, creatine, creatinine, dimethylglycine, asparagine, serine, and tyrosine (all p < 0.05) during the OGTT in the HLP group. The postprandial changes in isoleucine and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) during the OGTT were positively associated with the homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR; all p < 0.05) in the HLP group. Elevated oxidative stress and disordered energy metabolism during OGTTs are important characteristics of metabolic perturbations in HLP. Our findings offer new insights into the complex physiological regulation of metabolism during the OGTT in HLP.
Generation of Custom Co-processor Structure from C-Code

Designers of modern embedded systems may use two approaches for implementing an application: they can select an existing processor and map the application to it using a compiler, or they can design a custom processor for the code. While the secong approach provides optimality, the first one is cheaper and faster. To gain in terms of performance, cost and design time, we propose a method for extraction of application specific processor cores from its C code. Our approach consists of three phases. We start by quantifying the properties of the C code in terms of operation types, available parallelism and other metrics. We then create an initial data path to exploit the available parallelism. We then apply designer guided constraints to an interactive data path refinement algorithm that attempts to reduce the number of the most expensive components while meeting the constraints. Our experimental results show that our technique scales very well with the size of the C code. We demonstrate the efficiency of our technique on wide range of applications, from standard academic benchmarks to industrial size examples like the MP3 decoder. Each processor core was constructed and refined in under a minute, allowing the designer to explore several different configurations in much less time than needed for a manual design. We compared our selection algorithm to the manual selection in terms of cost/performance and showed that our optimization technique achieves better cost/performance trade-off. We also synthesized our designs with programmable controller and, on average, the refined core have only 23% latency overhead, twice as many block RAMs and 64% fewer slices compared to the respective manual designs.
Predicting Subsystem Failures using Dependency Graph Complexities

In any software project, developers need to be aware of existing dependencies and how they affect their system. We investigated the architecture and dependencies of Windows Server 2003 to show how to use the complexity of a subsystem's dependency graph to predict the number of failures at statistically significant levels. Such estimations can help to allocate software quality resources to the parts of a product that need it most, and as early as possible.