Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiple motives: Profiles of young Australians' reasons for musical engagement

Self-determination theory conceives of motivation as lying along an intrinsic-extrinsic continuum and has been investigated extensively in school learning, but less in performance domains. This paper investigates the ways that students manifest multiple motives for striving in the demanding field of musical performance. Performance examination candidates (n=677) aged 8-19 years completed questionnaires. Factor analysis produced five motives lying along the internal-external continuum. Cluster analysis then generated four groups of participants: (1) a group reporting high levels of internal motives and low levels of external motives, (2) a group reporting high levels of all five motives, (3) a group reporting low levels of internal motives and high levels of external motives, and (4) a group reporting low levels of all five motives. Results showed that both groups with high levels of internal motives achieved higher performance results than the two groups with low levels of internal motives. The high-external/low-internal group did not differ in performance achievement from the group reporting low levels of all motives. The study confirms prior research in suggesting that high levels of internalized motives can work together with high levels of external motives to produce excellent performance, but external motives alone are insufficient.
A routing load balancing policy for grid computing environments

The evolution of computers and networks has motivated the development of high performance systems using the distributed system concepts. Such evolution has motivated the study of load balancing techniques, low latency protocols, operating systems and middlewares. Furthermore, the evolution from distributed systems based on clusters to grid environments has motivated new researches to define load balancing algorithms to support scalable and heterogeneous computing capacity environments. In this paper, the route load balancing algorithm is proposed, presented and evaluated. This algorithm is designed to equally distribute the workload of tasks of parallel applications over grid computing environments. Experiments compare the performance of the proposed algorithm to others from literature. The obtained results allow concluding that the route algorithm is indicated for environments where there are several heterogeneous computers and parallel applications are composed of multiple tasks.
Motivation and ability: which students use online learning and what influence does it have on their achievement?

There has been much recent research examining online learning in universities, but two questions seem to have been largely overlooked in this context: (1) Which students voluntarily utilise web-based learning; and (2) Does this use influence their academic achievement? The current study aimed to determine whether the approaches to studying, ability, age, and gender of 110 undergraduates in the second year of a psychology degree predicted the extent to which they utilised online learning using Web Course Tools (WebCT) in support of a core Biological Psychology unit. Data were obtained from WebCT's student tracking system, Entwistle and Ramsden's 18-item Approaches to Studying Inventory (1983) and academic records. Multiple linear regressions and discriminant function analysis were used to examine whether individual differences predicted WebCT use, while analysis of covariance determined whether web use influenced academic achievement. The number of hits, length of access, and use of the bulletin board was predicted by age, with older students using WebCT more. These factors were also influenced by ability and achievement orientation. The degree of participation in self-assessment was not predicted by student variables, but, of those that repeated an online quiz, improvement was more likely in those with lower achievement orientation. Only bulletin board use influenced achievement, with those posting messages outperforming those not using, or passively using bulletin boards. However, because individual differences will determine the extent to which students utilise this facility, it is suggested that future research should focus on developing online learning environments that incorporate activities with both a beneficial influence on learning and appeal to a wide student population.
Stent-retriever thrombectomy after intravenous t-PA vs. t-PA alone in stroke.

BACKGROUND Among patients with acute ischemic stroke due to occlusions in the proximal anterior intracranial circulation, less than 40% regain functional independence when treated with intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (t-PA) alone. Thrombectomy with the use of a stent retriever, in addition to intravenous t-PA, increases reperfusion rates and may improve long-term functional outcome. METHODS We randomly assigned eligible patients with stroke who were receiving or had received intravenous t-PA to continue with t-PA alone (control group) or to undergo endovascular thrombectomy with the use of a stent retriever within 6 hours after symptom onset (intervention group). Patients had confirmed occlusions in the proximal anterior intracranial circulation and an absence of large ischemic-core lesions. The primary outcome was the severity of global disability at 90 days, as assessed by means of the modified Rankin scale (with scores ranging from 0 [no symptoms] to 6 [death]). RESULTS The study was stopped early because of efficacy. At 39 centers, 196 patients underwent randomization (98 patients in each group). In the intervention group, the median time from qualifying imaging to groin puncture was 57 minutes, and the rate of substantial reperfusion at the end of the procedure was 88%. Thrombectomy with the stent retriever plus intravenous t-PA reduced disability at 90 days over the entire range of scores on the modified Rankin scale (P<0.001). The rate of functional independence (modified Rankin scale score, 0 to 2) was higher in the intervention group than in the control group (60% vs. 35%, P<0.001). There were no significant between-group differences in 90-day mortality (9% vs. 12%, P=0.50) or symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (0% vs. 3%, P=0.12). CONCLUSIONS In patients receiving intravenous t-PA for acute ischemic stroke due to occlusions in the proximal anterior intracranial circulation, thrombectomy with a stent retriever within 6 hours after onset improved functional outcomes at 90 days. (Funded by Covidien; SWIFT PRIME ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01657461.).
Simulation and experimental results on monolithic CdZnTe gamma-ray detectors

Monolithic CdZnTe detectors are promising for medical and small animal imaging because of a good energy resolution that allows both multi-drug diagnostic and scatter event rejection. Optimizations of electrode geometry and detector thickness are used to improve detection efficiency as well as energy resolution for various material transport properties, with the ULYSSE simulator. As an example, for a 5 mm thick detector with (mutau)e=3.10-3 cmW, a 1.8 mm pitch gives the best simulated energy resolution on the conventional spectrum at 122 keV. Nevertheless, even with an optimized detector, electronic correction methods contribute to reduce tailing. Correction using cathode and anode signals have been tested with HPBM CdZnTe and THM CdTe:Cl detectors. The appropriate method to correct energy seems to depend on material. This paper also presents experimental results on charge sharing and loss
The Distribution of Physical Activity in an After-school Friendship Network

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether a child’s friendship network in an afterschool program influences his/her physical activity. METHODS: Three waves of data were collected from school-aged children participating in aftercare (n = 81; mean [SD] age, 7.96 [1.74] years; 40% African American, 39% white, and 19% Latino) a name generator survey was used to map each child’s social network, and accelerometers were used to measure physical activity. We applied stochastic actor-based modeling for social networks and behavior. RESULTS: Children did not form or dissolve friendships based on physical activity levels, but existing friendships heavily influenced children’s level of physical activity. The strongest influence on the amount of time children spent in moderate-to-vigorous activity in the afterschool hours was the activity level of their immediate friends. Children consistently made adjustments to their activity levels of 10% or more to emulate the activity levels of their peers (odds ratio [OR] = 6.89, P < .01). Age (OR = 0.92, P < .10) and obesity status (OR = 0.66, P < .10) had marginally significant and relatively small direct effects on the activity. Gender had no direct effect on activity. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that friendship ties play a critical role in setting physical activity patterns in children as young as 5 to 12 years. Children’s activity levels can be increased, decreased, or stabilized depending on the activity level of their immediate social network during a 12-week afterschool program. Network-based interventions hold the potential to produce clinically significant changes to children’s physical activity.
Sparse Ensemble Learning for Concept Detection

This work presents a novel sparse ensemble learning scheme for concept detection in videos. The proposed ensemble first exploits a sparse non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) process to represent data instances in parts and partition the data space into localities, and then coordinates the individual classifiers in each locality for final classification. In the sparse NMF, data exemplars are projected to a set of locality bases, in which the non-negative superposition of basis images reconstructs the original exemplars. This additive combination ensures that each locality captures the characteristics of data exemplars in part, thus enabling the local classifiers to hold reasonable diversity in their own regions of expertise. More importantly, the sparse NMF ensures that an exemplar is projected to only a few bases (localities) with non-zero coefficients. The resultant ensemble model is, therefore, sparse, in the way that only a small number of efficient classifiers in the ensemble will fire on a testing sample. Extensive tests on the TRECVid 08 and 09 datasets show that the proposed ensemble learning achieves promising results and outperforms existing approaches. The proposed scheme is feature-independent, and can be applied in many other large scale pattern recognition problems besides visual concept detection.
Sentence Selection Based on Extended Entropy Using Phonetic and Prosodic Contexts for Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis

This paper proposes a sentence selection technique for constructing phonetically and prosodically balanced compact recording scripts for speech synthesis. In the conventional corpus design of speech synthesis, a greedy algorithm that maximizes phonetic coverage is often used. However, for statistical parametric speech synthesis, balances of multiple phonetic and prosodic contextual factors are important as well as the coverage. To take account of both of the phonetic and prosodic contextual balances in sentence selection, we introduce an extended entropy of phonetic and prosodic contexts, such as biphone/triphone, accent/stress/tone, and sentence length. For detailed investigation, conventional and proposed techniques are evaluated using Japanese, English, and Chinese corpora. The objective experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves better coverage and balance of contexts. In addition, speech synthesis experiments based on hidden Markov models reveal that the generated speech parameters become closer to those of the natural speech compared with other conventional sentence selection techniques. Subjective evaluations show that the proposed sentence selection based on the extended entropy improves the naturalness of the synthetic speech while maintaining the similarity to the original sample.
Observer of the human cardiac sympathetic nerve activity using noncausal blind source separation

We present a novel method for the blind reconstruction of the cardiac sympathetic nerve activity (CSNA) in the low-frequency (LF) band (0.04-0.15 Hz) using only heart rate and arterial blood pressure. The originality of the method consists in the application of blind source separation techniques to obtain an observer of CSNA. We show how this observer can be deduced from a linear model of the cardiovascular system by introduction of the fundamental assumptions about the independence of the cardiac sympathetic an parasympathetic outflow. In cardiovascular applications, the reliability of the observer has been assessed by verification of the fundamental assumption for the given data. A primer qualitative validation has been performed using the muscle sympathetic nerve activity as an indirect indicator of CSNA. Very satisfying and promising results have been obtained. Moreover, we have performed quantitative validations of the observer in various experimental conditions known to elicit selectively cardiac sympathetic or parasympathetic response. The experimental conditions include a supine-to-60/spl deg/ tilt test, indirect sympathetic stimulation/inhibition by medication, and sympathetic stimulation by isometric handgrip. We show that the observer allows to highlight changing levels of the cardiac sympathetic activity in the LF band in all these experimental conditions.
Presenilin-1 binds cytoplasmic epithelial cadherin, inhibits cadherin/p120 association, and regulates stability and function of the cadherin/catenin adhesion complex

Here we show that presenilin-1 (PS1), a protein involved in Alzheimer's disease, binds directly to epithelial cadherin (E-cadherin). This binding is mediated by the large cytoplasmic loop of PS1 and requires the membrane-proximal cytoplasmic sequence 604–615 of mature E-cadherin. This sequence is also required for E-cadherin binding of protein p120, a known regulator of cadherin-mediated cell adhesion. Using wild-type and PS1 knockout cells, we found that increasing PS1 levels suppresses p120/E-cadherin binding, and increasing p120 levels suppresses PS1/E-cadherin binding. Thus PS1 and p120 bind to and mutually compete for cellular E-cadherin. Furthermore, PS1 stimulates E-cadherin binding to β- and γ-catenin, promotes cytoskeletal association of the cadherin/catenin complexes, and increases Ca2+-dependent cell–cell aggregation. Remarkably, PS1 familial Alzheimer disease mutant ΔE9 increased neither the levels of cadherin/catenin complexes nor cell aggregation, suggesting that this familial Alzheimer disease mutation interferes with cadherin-based cell–cell adhesion. These data identify PS1 as an E-cadherin-binding protein and a regulator of E-cadherin function in vivo.
Evaluation of a Contextual Assistant Interface Using Cognitive Models

Cognitive models allow predicting some aspects of utility and usability of human machine interfaces, and also simulating the interaction with these interfaces. The action of predicting is based on a task analysis which analyses what a user is required to do in terms of actions and cognitive processes to achieve a task. Task analysis facilitates the understanding of the functionalities of the system to be modeled. Cognitive models are part of the analytical approaches that do not make necessarily appeal to the user during the interface development process. This paper presents a study about the evaluation of a human machine interaction (HMI) with an interface of a contextual assistant, using ACT-R and GOMS cognitive models. It shows how these techniques may be applied in HMI evaluation, design and research, emphasizing on the task analysis in one side, and on the time execution of tasks in the other side. In order to validate and support our results, an experimental study of user performance, during the interaction with the contextual assistant interface is conducted at the DOMUS laboratory. The results of our models show that both models GOMS and ACT-R give good to very good predictions of user performance at the task level as well as the object level, our results are very close to those obtained in the experimental study. Keywords—HMI, interface evaluation, cognitive modeling, user modeling, user performance.
A Preliminary Investigation into Sentiment Analysis of Informal Political Discourse

With the rise of weblogs and the increasing tendency of online publications to turn to message-board style reader feedback venues, informal political discourse is becoming an important feature of the intellectual landscape of the Internet, creating a challenging and worthwhile area for experimentation in techniques for sentiment analysis. We describe preliminary statistical tests on a new dataset of political discussion group postings which indicate that posts made in direct response to other posts in a thread have a strong tendency to represent an opposing political viewpoint to the original post. We conclude that traditional text classification methods will be inadequate to the task of sentiment analysis in this domain, and that progress is to be made by exploiting information about how posters interact with each
Comparative sensitivity of juvenile and adult Potamopyrgus antipodarum (Mollusca: Hydrobiidae) under chronic exposure to cadmium and tributyltin

ABSTRACT To investigate a potential extension of a partial life cycle test protocol to a full life cycle test design, a comparative sensitivity analysis with juvenile and adult Potamopyrgus antipodarum was performed. Neonates and adult snails were exposed to the metal cadmium (Cd) and the endocrine disruptor tributyltin (TBT) at nominal concentrations ranging from 1.56 to 50 μg Cd/L and from 25 to 1,000 ng TBT-Sn/L. The experiments were performed over 28 days at 16°C in a semi-static test design. Mortality was assessed for both life stages. Juvenile snails' specific growth rate and reproduction of adults were investigated as main endpoints. We determined effects on snails' survival, juvenile growth and embryo numbers in the brood pouch of adult snails under exposure to both chemicals. Juvenile control mortality was between 25% and 30% and significantly higher than in the control groups with adult snails. A higher sensitivity of juvenile snails compared to adults was observed for the endpoint mortality. Calculated LC50 in Cd exposed snails was 38.2 μg/L for adults and 15.0 μg/L for juvenile snails. Significant effects on mortality in TBT exposed adult snails occurred at the highest test concentration only with a LC50 of 535 ng Sn/L. Juvenile survival was significantly affected at 50.8 ng Sn/L and higher concentrations. Effect concentrations for the main endpoints reproduction and juvenile growth show comparable sensitivities. For Cd exposed groups, EC50 values were 11.3 μg/L for the endpoint reproduction in adult snails and 3.82 μg/L for juvenile growth with overlapping confidence intervals. TBT also significantly affected juvenile snails' growth (EC50: 178 ng Sn /L). EC50 for embryo numbers was 125 ng TBT-Sn/L. Results indicate the manageability of a FLC test starting with newly hatched snails. Precautions have to be taken to guarantee a sufficient number of surviving snails until adulthood so that reproduction can be assessed. For final decision for the practicability of a FLC, further tests are needed.
A Case of Severe Anemia by Necator americanus Infection in Korea

This report describes clinical and parasitological findings of an 82-yr-old female patient who lived in a local rural village and suffered from severe chronic anemia for several years. She was transferred to the National Police Hospital in Seoul for management of severe dyspnea and dizziness. At admission, she showed symptoms or signs of severe anemia. Gastroduodenoscopy observed hyperemic mucosa of the duodenum and discovered numerous moving roundworms on the mucosa. Endoscopy isolated seven of them, which were identified as Necator americanus by characteristic morphology of cutting plates in the buccal cavity. The patient was treated with albendazole and supportive measures for anemia, and her physical condition much improved. This case suggests the possibility that hookworm N. americanus is still transmitted in a remote local mountainous area in Korea.
Medicaid Coverage Expansion and Implications for Cancer Disparities.

OBJECTIVES We estimated the impact on cancer disparities in US states that have chosen or not chosen to expand Medicaid since passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. METHODS Data came from the 2013 Uniform Data System for colorectal and cervical cancer screening rates among patients of federally qualified health centers (FQHCs); the 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for colorectal, cervical, and breast cancer screening rates; and the US Cancer Statistics (2007-2011) for colorectal, cervical, and breast cancer mortality-to-incidence ratios (MIRs). Dyads of Medicaid expansion decisions with cancer screening rates and MIRs were mapped using ArcMap. RESULTS States that had not expanded Medicaid as of September 2014 had lower cancer screening rates, especially among FQHC patients. Overall, cancer MIRs were not significantly different by Medicaid expansion status. However, Southeastern states without Medicaid expansion tended to have higher cancer MIRs and lower screening rates. CONCLUSIONS Disparities in cancer screening that already disfavor states with high cancer rates may widen in states that have not chosen to expand Medicaid unless significant efforts are mounted to ensure their residents obtain preventive health care.
The Cost of Integrated HIV Care and Buprenorphine/Naloxone Treatment: Results of a Cross-Site Evaluation

Background:Implementing integrated HIV and buprenorphine/naloxone treatment requires cost estimates to plan and obtain funding. Methods:We identified costs incurred at HIV clinical sites participating in a cross-site evaluation of integrated care that followed patients for 1 year. Costs include labor, overhead, and urine toxicology analyses (clinic perspective), buprenorphine/naloxone (payer perspective) and patient time and transportation (patient perspective). Sites provided resource utilization quarterly, and providers estimated time required for each activity. With site as the unit of analysis, results are reported as median (range) of average site costs in 2008 US dollars. Results:The median number of monthly provider encounters for integrated care patients was 3.2 (1.5-13.3) compared with 1.7 (1.1-4.2) for similar patients not in integrated care, but integrated care patients had fewer physician encounters. Median monthly clinic costs per integrated care patient were $136 ($67-$677) for labor and overhead and $8 ($2-$23) for toxicology analyses, $22 higher than clinic costs for patients not in integrated care. Median monthly costs for buprenorphine/naloxone were $209 ($165-$272), and monthly patient costs in integrated care were $11 ($1-$54) higher. Conclusions:Integrated HIV and buprenorphine/naloxone treatment requires different resources, including costs that are not third-party reimbursed. Implementing integrated care will require funding for training and for new staff such as buprenorphine coordinators, in addition to reimbursement for buprenorphine/naloxone. Further research is needed to identify potential cost offsets outside of the clinic setting.
Discrete-Tap Control Scheme for Capacitive Compensation of Distribution Feeders

Substation-based computers for control of reactive power on distribution primary feeders are being included within the distribution automation schemes now undergoing installation. This paper develops the algorithmic basis for the optimal control strategies necessary to capacitively compensate distribution feeders having capacitors with multiple-tap settings. The theory underlying these discrete-control strategies is presented along with simple numerical examples which show how to minimize the kilowatt power losses as reactive load varies on the feeders.